52 SPOLIA ZEYLANICA. 
touch sensations we never know, and sights we never see. 
And this because our susceptibility to wave vibrations are 
so excessively limited. Suppose now our susceptibility be 
suddenly increased ten-fold, the material world would be 
instantly and miraculously changed beyond all recognition : 
one cannot even guess what the new world would be lke ; 
we have not the faintest idea ; all that we do know is that the 
universe would be grander and fuller in every sense of the 
words than it is even now, and our conceptions of Nature’s 
mechanism would be absolutely changed. But there is no 
reason to suppose that the limit of the theoretically knowable 
is to be reached by multiplying all that is known by so low a 
number as 10; indeed, I think most of us feel that the theoreti- 
cally knowable is out of all proportion to the known. The 
relation of a pimple to a mountain is probably a very inade- 
quate comparison in this connection. 
What, then, is the conclusion we must draw from the accepted 
facts of natural science? Why, surely, this. Our universe 
exists by virtue of the limits of our senses. The world, as we 
know it, is the world of man created by man, not of his own 
desire, but in response to some other power than the human 
will. But it will be objected : you first set out to show that 
our scientific theories are at best guesses at the truth, and yet 
you do not hesitate to found a very vital conclusion upon 
them. My answer is that we have arrived at this conclusion 
from a perusal of the wave theory, and, so far as our ultimate 
conclusion is concerned, it does not matter one jot whether the 
wave theory is the true interpretation of phenomena or not. 
The point is that if we believe, as I think we are justified in 
believing, that there is something in the back of beyond which 
somehow corresponds to our interpretation of it, then we see 
that, whatever that something is, it is the starting point of our 
sensations ; and our want of receptibility to this same some- 
thing defines a limit to our experience. We have arrived, tken, 
at the assumption that there is some definite correspondence 
between the phenomena of Nature as observed by us, and the 
mechanism of Nature which is supposed to lie behind those 
phenomena. We shall be agreed, I think, that this assump- 
tion is not illogical or unjustified, and that working out the 
