XXXII 



ON MIND AS UNKNOWABLE 1 



THIRTY years ago, physicists unacquainted with 

 psychological inquiry and with the subtler physi- 

 cal considerations, believed that they could claim 

 complete knowledge of matter, which they regard- 

 ed as the only reality other than mind. It is 

 not meant that they claimed to have exhausted 

 all the possibilities of chemistry or physics, but 

 that they believed they had identified and could 

 describe the ultimate units of matter, the atoms 

 which, as Clerk-Maxwell said, are " the foundation- 

 stones of the material universe, which have existed 

 since the creation, unbroken and unworn." But 

 modern physics has proved that matter is none 

 other than the expression of an eternal power 

 which can be known to us only in its appearances, 

 or phenomena. Materialism as a dogmatic system 

 has been irremediably destroyed by the continued 

 application of those methods on whose early, un- 

 critical employment it was based. We may leave 

 it now for those whose scientific knowledge is suf- 

 ficiently imperfect and antiquated. 



1 Reprinted, with some modification, by permission, from the 

 Occult Review, June, 1905. 



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