PHYSIOLOGY VERSUS METAPHYSICS. 255 



thinking), the mechanism of which they in no wise understand, to an 

 agent (the soul), the mere existence of which they fail to substantiate. 



If it be urged on behalf of any class of metaphysical school-men, 

 who may refuse to accept Kant's modest avowal of failure, that they 

 really have succeeded (because to their own contentment) in fathom- 

 ing the problems of the genesis of mind and the nature of the soul, 

 and that they are not answerable for the defective intelligence of the 

 outside world, which fails to follow them, the physiologist need not 

 hesitate to concede that they soar in a region of visionary transcen- 

 dentalism, for which his mental bias and material modes of thought 

 have not fitted him either as a worker or a critic. He is as ill adapted 

 for reveling in trains of speculative abstraction, whereof the issue, 

 purely subjective, can never reach the reality of objective demonstra- 

 tiveness, as the metaphysician for peering through lenses many a weary 

 day and night to verify a single fact, the present obvious value of 

 which may be nil, but of which the future story may be written as 

 the starting link of chains of important truths. Between the meta- 

 physical contemplative mind and the scientific observant mind the 

 antagonism is so profound that the union of the two qualities in the 

 same individual, even in very different degrees of potentiality, is the 

 rarest of intellectual endowments. 



The physiologist of the pure observation school may, then, admit 

 his deficiency in critical training for the just estimation of metaphys- 

 ical methods, and this all the more resignedly in that (as we shall by- 

 and-by fully see) metaphysicians are found occasionally confessing, 

 nay boasting, that they fail to understand each other, while they are 

 likewise accused, apparently on justifiable grounds, of not at all times 

 and seasons thoroughly comprehending each man his own individual 

 w^ork. So the physiologist need not trouble himself about methods 

 but ask for results. And this he has ventured to do, conceivins: him- 

 self entitled by the worth of the latter to gauge the efliciency of the 

 former. While, then, acknowledging in a spirit of homage savoring of 

 of awe the abstract grandeur of the metaphysical intellect and the 

 aims of its activity, he has earnestly but not irreverently inquired. Do 

 you metaphysicians not deceive yourselves? Are you "quite sure you 

 do not take words for ideas ? Have you or have you not perpetually 

 confounded figments of the brain with realities ? To what increments 

 of true knowledge — the real, substantial knowledge of things — can 

 you lay claim ? Have you of late done much more than clothe old 

 thoughts in new phraseology — phraseology of greater precision than 

 that it has supplanted, we may fairly concede? Have you not in 

 sober truth been engaged since the dawn of philosophy — multum 

 agendi, pmtxillum agentes (doing much, accomplishing little) — in a 

 still beginning, never ending, logomachia ? Can you point among 

 your fellows to that emphatic unanimity of creed on fundamental 

 questions which shall demand, as its right, acceptance from the out- 



