434 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



evaded the questions that move unprejudiced youth most deeply, or 

 treated them from a superior altitude as officious speculations ; and 

 has, finally, held so hostile an attitude toward the new world-power, 

 natural science, that it is not surprising that even the recollection of 

 the earlier achievements of philosophy should have been lost. This is, 

 indeed, partly due to the circumstance that the newer philosophy 

 stands in a negative or in no clear relation to positive religion, and 

 avoids expressing itself on certain questions ; so that it has happened 

 that the most pregnant problems in metaphysics have not been set 

 forth and discussed by philosophy, at least not in a language accept- 

 able to scientific men, since the middle of the last century. This may 

 be one of the reasons why philosophy is often despised as objectless 

 and useless, and why, when natural science and philosophy touch at so 

 many points, such ignorance and lack of preliminary ideas are shown 

 in connection with actual achievements. 



I w T as reproached, on the other side, because I had assigned im- 

 passable boundaries to the human powers of knowledge, by men who 

 could not understand why consciousness could not be made compre- 

 hensible in the same way as the development of heat by chemical ac- 

 tion, or the excitement of electricity in the galvanic circuit. Cobblers 

 left their lasts and sneered at the humble confession of " Ignorabimus," 

 by which " not-knowledge " was declared in permanency ; and I was 

 denounced as belonging to the Black Band by fanatics who should 

 have known better, and who showed anew how nearly together des- 

 potism and extreme radicalism dwell. More temperate heads betrayed 

 the weakness of their dialectics in that they could not grasp the differ- 

 ence between the view which I opposed, that consciousness can be 

 explained upon a mechanical basis, and the view which I did not ques- 

 tion, but supported with new arguments, that consciousness is bound 

 to material antecedents. 



David Friedrich Strauss, who had recently turned from theological 

 studies to natural science, saw more sharply. It did not escape him 

 that I had put myself in regard to mental processes at the point of 

 view of the inductive philosopher, who does not separate the process 

 from the substratum on which he learned to know the process, and 

 who does not without sufficient motive think of the process as discon- 

 nected from the substratum. 



Even he criticised in a remarkable way my declaration of the in- 

 comprehensibility of consciousness on a mechanical basis, saying : 

 " There are confessedly three points in the ascending development of 

 nature to w r hich the appearance of the incomprehensible is especially 

 attached. They are the three questions, How has the living arisen out 

 of the lifeless, how the sensible out of the senseless, how the under- 

 standing out of the not-understanding ? The author of the ' Limits of 

 our Knowledge of Nature ' holds the first of the three problems, A, to 

 be solvable. He facilitates the solution of the third problem, C, that of 



