HOW PHENOMENA ARE INTERPRETED. 65 



of philosophers ? If we possess it to-day in the sense that 

 we possess proof, — say, of the North Pole or the existence of 

 the ether of space, — where is it to be found ? Proof of the 

 latter compels assent as soon as perceived, yet every one feels 

 there is something desirable lacking in the former. It may be 

 more or less probable, but certainty is what we are talking 

 about. 



Again, creation implies a process by which nothing becomes 

 something. If the matter which constitutes the world was 

 simply formed out of something else which was not matter, 

 then it is that something else we are concerned about, and the 

 inquiry properly belongs to that antecedent something. Now 

 all of our experiences in any field are with matter and with 

 forms of energy. Experience with the former has led to the 

 conviction that its quantity is not changed in the slightest 

 degree by any kind of a physical or chemical process. Once it 

 was thought possible to change lead to gold, but it was in the 

 prescientific age when chemical products were not weighed in 

 the balance, and the spectra of the elements had not been seen. 

 Experience with energy has led to the formulation embodied 

 in the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, namely, that 

 the quantity of energy in the universe is constant. No kind 

 of changes alters the quantity. If these deductions from expe- 

 rience be true, it follows that either what we call matter and 

 energy have always existed, or, if either had a beginning, it 

 must have been by some process out of all relation to every- 

 thing we know, — ■ one which can neither be described nor 

 imagined, and explanation is therefore impossible, if explana- 

 tion means what we mean by it when applied to such a process 

 as, say, the generation of electricity in a dynamo ; for in 

 this we have definite known antecedents of steam power, heat, 

 and so on. In experience we have only transformations, all 

 of which imply matter as the condition of transformations. 

 The creation of energy is a radically different affair, and it 

 is a fair question, by what warrant does any one assume a 

 process wholly foreign to experience as a basis of a philos- 

 ophy of experience } 



Again, the fallibility of human logic has been so many times 



