1891.] on the Implications of Science. 435 



at, such results can only be reached by thoughts, and must be expressed 

 by the aid of our thoughts. This will probably seem such a manifest 

 truism that I shall be thought to have committed an absurdity in enun- 

 ciating it. To suppose that by any reasoning we can come to under- 

 stand what we can never think, may seem an utterly incredible folly ; 

 yet at a meeting of a metaphysical society in London a speaker not 

 long ago expressly declared "thought" to be a misleading term, 

 the use of which should be avoided. 



Now I am far from denying that unconscious activities, of various 

 different orders, take place in our being ; yet whatever influence such 

 activities may have, they cannot affect our judgments save by and in 

 thoughts. 



If a man is convinced that thoughts are worthless tools, he can 

 only have arrived at that conclusion by using the very tools he declares 

 to be worthless. What, then, ought his conclusion to be worth even 

 in his own eyes ? It is simply impossible by reason to get behind or 

 beyond conscious thought, and our thoughts are and must be our only 

 means of investigating problems however fundamental. Even in 

 investigating the properties of material bodies, it is to self-conscious 

 reflective thought that our final appeal must be made. It is to 

 our thoughts and not to our senses only, that our ultimate appeal 

 must be made, even with respect to the most material physical science 

 matters. Some persons may imagine that with respect to such investi- 

 gations about the properties of material bodies, it is to our sensations 

 alone that we must ultimately appeal. But it is not so. Any one would 

 be mad to question the extreme importance, the absolute necessity, of 

 our sensations in such a case ; nevertheless, after we have made all the 

 observations and experiments we can, how can we know we have 

 obtained such results as we may have obtained, save by our self- 

 conscious thought ? By what other means are we to judge between 

 what may seem to be the conflicting indications of different sense 

 impressions? Our senses are truly tests of certainty but not the 

 test. Certainty belongs to thought, and self-conscious reflective 

 thought is our last and absolute criterion. 



As to the ultimate grounds on which our judgments respecting 

 such problems must repose, as Mr. Arthur Balfour has forcibly pointed 

 out, that is a question altogether disT;inct from all questions as to the 

 origin of our judgments, or reasonings about their truth. Such matters 

 are very interesting, but they are not here in point, since it is plain 

 that no proposition capable of proof can be one the certainty of which 

 is fundamental. For in order to prove anything by reasoning, we 

 must show that it necessarily follows as a consequence from other 

 truths which therefore must be deemed more indisputable. But the 

 process must stop somewhere. We cannot prove everything. How- 

 ever long our arguments may be, we must at last come to ultimate 

 statements which must be taken for granted like the validity of the 

 process of reasoning itself, which is one of the imi^lications of science. 

 If we had to prove either the validity of that process or such ultimate 



