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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



see that there is no paradox in thus using them, 

 we must go back a little to general principles. 

 The matter turns altogether upon habits of 

 thought. What seems to you so shocking will 

 often seem to us so ennobling, and what seems 

 to us flimsy will often seem to you sublime, 

 simply because our minds have been trained in 

 different logical methods; and hence you will call 

 that a beautiful truth which strikes us as nothing 

 but a random guess. It is idle, of course, to dis- 

 pute about our respective logical methods, or to 

 pit this habit of mind in a combat with that. 

 But we may understand each other better if we 

 can agree to follow out the moral and religious 

 temper, and learu that it is quite compatible with 

 this or that mental procedure. It may teach us 

 again that ancient truth, how much human nature 

 there is in men ; what fellowship there is in our 

 common aspirations and moral forces; how we 

 all live the same spiritual life ; whde the philoso- 

 phies are but the ceaseless toil of the intellect 

 seeking again and again to explain more clearly 

 that spiritual life, and to furnish it with reasons 

 for the faith that is in it. 



This would be no place to expound or to de- 

 fend the positive method of thought. The ques- 

 tion before us is simply, if this positive method 

 has a place in the spiritual world or has any- 

 thing to say about a future beyond the grave. 

 Suffice it that we mean by the positive method of 

 thought (and we will now use the term in a sense 

 not limited to the social construction of Comte) 

 that method which would base life and conduct, 

 as well as knowledge, upon such evidence as can 

 be referred to logical canons of proof, which 

 would place all that occupies man in a homo- 

 geneous system of law. On the other hand, this 

 method turns aside from hjpolheses not to be 

 tested by any known logical canon familiar to 

 science, whether the hypothesis claim support 

 from intuition, arpiration, or general plausibility. 

 And, again, this method turns aside from ideal 

 standards which avow themselves to bo laivless, 

 which profess to transcend the field of law. We 

 say, life and conduct shall stand for us wholly on 

 a basis of law, and must rest entirely in that re- 

 gion of science (not physical but moral and social 

 science) where we are free to use our intelligence 

 in the methods known to us as intelligible logic, 

 methods which the intellect can analyze. When 

 you confront us with hypotheses, however sub- 

 lime and however affecting, if they cannot be 

 stated in terms of the rest of our knowledge, if 

 they are disparate to that world of sequence and 

 sensation which to us is the ultimate base of all 



our real knowledge, then we shake our heads and 

 turn aside. I say, turn aside ; and I do not say, 

 dispute. We cannot disprove the suggestion that 

 there are higher channels to knowledge in our 

 aspirations or our presentiments, as there might 

 be in our dreams by night as well as by day ; we 

 courteously salute the hypotheses, as we might 

 love our pleasant dreams ; we seek to prove no 

 negatives. We do not pretend there are no 

 mysteries ; we do not frown on the poetic splen- 

 dors of the fancy. There is a world of beauty 

 and of pathos in the vast ether of the Unknown 

 in which this solid ball hangs like a speck. Let 

 all who list, who have true imagination and not 

 mere paltering with a loose fancy — let them in- 

 dulge their gift, and tell us what their soaring 

 has unfolded. Only let us not waste life in crude 

 dreaming, or loosen the knees of action. For 

 life and conduct, and the great emotions which 

 react on life and conduct, we can place nowhere 

 but in the same sphere of knowledge, under the 

 same canons of proof, to which we intrust all 

 parts of our life. We will ask the same philoso- 

 phy which teaches us the lessons of civilization 

 to guide our lives as responsible men ; and we go 

 again to the same philosophy which orders our 

 lives to explain to us the lessons of death. We 

 crave to have the supreme hours of our existence 

 lighted up by thoughts and motives such as we 

 can measure beside the common acts of our daily 

 existence, so that each hour of our life up to the 

 grave may be linked to the life beyond the grave 

 as one continuous whole, " bound each to each 

 by natural piety." And so, wasting no sighs 

 over the incommensurable possibilities of the 

 fancy, we will march on with a firm step till we 

 knock at the gates of death ; bearing always the 

 same human temper, in the same reasonable be- 

 liefs, and with the same earthly hopes of pro- 

 longed activity among our fellows, with which we 

 set out gayly in the morning of life. 



When we come to the problem of the human 

 soul, we simply treat man as man, and we study 

 him in accordance with our human experience. 

 Man is a marvelous and complex being, we may 

 fairly say of complexity past any hope of final 

 .analysis of ours, fearfully and wonderfully made 

 to the point of being mysterious. But incredible 

 progress has been won in reading this complexity, 

 in reducing this mystery to order. Who can say 

 that man shall ever be anything but an object of 

 awe and of unfathomable pondering to himself? 

 Yet he would be false to all that is great in him, 

 if he decried what he already has achieved tow- 

 ard self-knowledge. Man has probed his own 



