638 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tends constantly to produce one-sidedness. Nature strives ever 

 to rectify this tendency by presenting to us an unsorted variety 

 of details, and succeeds in keeping most of us within the bounds 

 of sanity, though not of perfect balance. " The complexity of our 

 environment," says Kibot, " is our safeguard against automatism." 

 But our ideas are ingrowing, and need to be constantly watched 

 and corrected. Insanity is a matter of degree. When the " fixed 

 ideas " which few of us are without pass a certain point and get 

 too obtrusive, we become monomaniacs. Men of one idea, men 

 of mental bias, narrow-minded men, present milder cases of the 

 same disease. 



Fruitful illustrations of this law may be seen in the systems 

 of thought that have prevailed since the days of Pythagoras. 

 Systems of words would be a better name for many of them. 

 As in our seeing, so in our thinking, we are limited by the ap- 

 paratus that happens to be at our command. For most of us,, 

 at least, the available apparatus for constructing a philosophi- 

 cal system is a philosophical vocabulary. From this fact and 

 the further one that these vocabularies are largely inherited 

 from the schools, it results that the apperceptive organs of meta- 

 physicians are wofully inadequate to the task they undertake, 

 namely, the cognition of ultimate realities. It is no wonder, 

 therefore, that these realities have been persistently apperceived 

 under so many different forms in the various metaphysical sys- 

 tems, supported by so many "hide-bound adult philosophers."' 

 Many a well-meaning philosopher has got caught in the swing 

 of a certain terminology, till his thoughts have become slaves to 

 the movements of his tongue. We are reminded of Aristotle's, 

 categories, Kant's map of the mind, Comte's three stages, Hegel's 

 thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the absolute and the finite, sub- 

 ject and object, mind and matter, body and spirit, noumenon and 

 phenomenon, real and ideal, rational and empirical. This is the 

 " tyranny of formulas " from whose iron rule science is now escap- 

 ing, but which is still the terror of philosophy and religion. 



The danger of words and formulas may be well illustrated 

 further by the mischief made in philosophy by the presence of 

 negative terms. These are the words which in the finished 

 systems of the philosophers mark, we may say, the absence of 

 thought. We recall the "Infinite " of Zeno and Kant, the "Ab- 

 solute " of Fichte and Hegel, the " Supra-essential " of Pseudo-Dio- 

 nysius, the " Unconditioned" of Hamilton, the " Unknowable " of 

 Spencer, the " iVctf-ourselves " of Matthew Arnold, the " Uncon- 

 scious " of von Hartmann, the "Immortality " of Christian believ- 

 ers, the m ov of the Greeks, and the " iVon-being " of the Hege- 

 lians. These represent the unfathomable places in thought, which 

 we bridge with a negative term and pass on blithely as before, but 



