134 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRl'.SS SiaXloN F. 



but from feelings, impulses, aspirations, instinctive or intuitive 

 awarenesses of any kind. A cautious philosophy, like a cautious 

 science, will not make confident assertions that go beyond the 

 limits of probable knowledge. 'But philosophy cannot admit that 

 the unknown reality must remain unknown. And the function 

 and justification of philosophy lie in the fact that without its 

 speculative ventures into the unknown, which are of the very 

 same nature as scientific hypotheses, although vaster and further- 

 reaching, knowledge could not advance for lack of inspiration 

 and impetus. It is in this spirit that a genuine philosophy of 

 experience suggests — as a hypothesis that arises from reflection 

 on the nature of our experience and from the inspirations of life 

 itself — that matter may, after all, be only mind in disguise, or 

 that what we call things must have an inner nature or being- 

 for-self which is not wholly different from our own. It is t'he 

 same feeling of our oneness with nature that leads science to 

 seek to reduce mind to terms of matter and philosophy to reduce 

 matter to terms of mind. It is only the double tendency, and 

 the gradual approach of the two through open-minded sugges- 

 tion and verification, that can lead to further truth. " We shall 

 then discover," says Mach, " that our hunger is not so essentially 

 different from the tendency of sulphuric acid for zinc, and our 

 will not so greatly different from the pressure of a stone, as now 

 appears " ;^* or as philosophy puts it from the other side, that 

 "if ' atoms ' and ' electrons ' are more than counters of phy- 

 sical calculation, they, too, know us, after their fashion. Not 

 as human beings, o!f course, but as whirling mazes of atoms and 

 electrons like themselves, which somehow preserve the same 

 general patterns of their dance, influencing them and reciprocally 

 influenced."'^-' Such conceptions, in ovu* present state of know- 

 ledge, seem unreal. But they are finger-posts on the way to 

 truth. At all events, they are better than the attitude expressed 

 (whichever way we take it) in the old saw: 



" What is mind ? No matter. 

 What is matter? Never mind." 



^^ Science of Media iiics. p. 464. 

 "• .Schiller. /(;<•. cit. 



