IMAGO MUNDI 9 



race but of all conscious intelligence. A careful observer of 

 nature's plan has very cleverly remarked that the deer, scenting 

 danger in the wind, and gauging the direction, turns to flee 

 oppositely, reasons no less scientifically, builds up the same 

 complex inference from previous experience as does the man 

 of science. 1 The fox, eluding his pursuers by doubling upon his 

 tracks, the hound in following the scent, and when it is lost 

 beating about the bush in the expectation that it will be caught 

 again, follows out a train of reasoning differing neither in degree 

 nor kind, and probably but little less conscious, than Newton 

 inferring the law of gravitation from the falling of the apple. 



With due deference to the piquant reveries of the geometers 

 of multi- dimensional space, it is in little that we may con- 

 ceive the main conclusions of Euclid vitiated through another 

 two thousand or twenty thousand years. His axioms and his 

 conclusions rest upon a registered racial experience an experi- 

 ence that, as Spencer was perhaps the first to point out, is now 

 a part, an anatomical part, of the physical constitution of our 

 minds. It seems a little lost to view that our ideas of space, 

 our conceptions of three dimensions and no more, are the 

 physical product of a physical process that began with the 

 appearance of life upon the earth. If the fourth dimension 

 existed, it would to-day be as distinctly a part of our current 

 beliefs, as distinctly a factor of our modes of daily thought, as 

 are the primal three. 



The foundations of science are firm. Its conclusions are not 

 chimeras, unless indeed we are to accept the monstrous idea 

 that the mind is so capable of turning round upon itself as to 

 believe it has no individual existence. Like Kapila, in the 

 early dawn of speculative philosophy, we may dream that 

 " Neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor is there any I." It seems 

 to the present writer there is no middle ground ; it is an 

 absolute nihilism that must outdo the Fichtean akosmism as 

 does the latter a Berkeleyan idealism, or the acceptance of the 

 conclusions of experimental science for what they seem. 



For sane folk with a work to do in the world there will be 

 little hesitation, and for them and all of those whose endeavour 

 it is to follow in the pathways of the light, the horizons have of 

 late been considerably enlarged. I doubt not that a future age 

 will accord to our own something like a clear and somewhat 



1 Williams, History of Science, chap. i. 



