492 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and so ought to be encyclical, encyclopedic. It must no more neglect 

 the positive sciences than the moral. "A wider metaphysic would 

 not harm our physic " is an abundantly true warning. Equally true 

 is it that a wider physic would not harm our metaphysic. It fills me 

 with amazement to see the arguments still resorted to by men, learned 

 in a fashion, and full of good-will, but quite unacquainted with the 

 true bearings of the problems which agitate the modern mind, nay, 

 totally devoid of the intellectual training necessary in order so much 

 as to appreciate them. Their blindness to the signs of the times is 

 well-nigh miraculous. They do not seem to possess even the sensitive 

 membrane which Darwin tells us is the beginning of the eye. Who, 

 that is at all competent to judge, can deny that the progress of the 

 sciences during the present century has largely revolutionized the 

 world of thought, or doubt that many old questions assume quite a 

 new aspect in the light now shed upon them ? To take one instance 

 only, spiritualism is by no means bound up with the old dualistic con- 

 ceptions which posit matter and mind as two incomprehensibly re- 

 lated substances, eternally alien from each other, and irreconcilably 

 hostile. For myself, every day that I live I become more confirmed 

 in the belief, which I expressed some years ago in this " Review," that 

 " the old wall of partition between spirit and matter is cracking in all 

 directions," that " we shall come to recognize a thinking substance, of 

 which thought is the foundation, not the resultant." * Even now — in 

 words whieh I gladly borrow from Mr. Romanes — may we not regard 

 " any sequence of natural causation as the merely phenomenal aspect 

 of the ontological reality, the outward manifestation of an inward 

 meaning " ? The reality is spiritual, the phenomenon merely the 

 shadow and the symbol. Materialism, like all errors, is but the dis- 

 tortion of a truth. It is a false expression of that tendency to unity 

 which is so marked a characteristic of the modern mind, and which is 

 not false. A century ago Lessing pronounced iv koX irav to be the 

 last word of philosophy. Whatever exception may be taken to the 

 formula, assuredly, it adumbrates a great verity. And as assuredly 

 none can be further removed from the apprehension of that verity 

 than those who, like Diderot, discern in the universe nothing but 

 " one and the same phenomenon indefinitely diversified." Enveloped 

 as we are, according to the profound doctrine of the old Yedic sages, 

 in the veil of Maya, what grosser illusion can there be than to mis- 

 take the fleeting shows apprehensible by our senses for the Self-Ex- 

 istent ? " Of him, and through him, and to him are all things." 

 Most near and most hidden all phenomena consist by him, all phe- 

 nomena point to him, his indwelling leads us to his transcendence. 

 " Wer darf ihn nennen?" — Who dare name him? — the poet asks.f 



9 See "Ancient Religion and Modern Thought," pp. 3-10-315, third edition. 

 •}• Compare St. Augustine: "Quid dicit aliquis, cum de Te dicit? Et vse taccntibus 

 de Tc ; quoniam Ioquaccs muti sunt." 



