FIRST PRINCIPLES 25 



clairvoyants ; to search the files of telegrams until Madame 

 Blavatsky's communications with India are found to be 

 transmitted by no agency more marvellous than the electric 

 telegraph. It is not for the man of science to adopt an 

 attitude of either credulity or incredulity. Into the world 

 of consciousness he, as a man of science, does not claim 

 admission ; but matter and force are within his province, 

 and his duty to investigate all phenomena which they 

 exhibit is not in any way affected by the pretended mystery 

 of the agencies which evoke them. 



The Relation of Philosophy to Science. In con- 

 sidering the boundaries of science, w r e have already antici- 

 pated some of the reflections to which this subject naturally 

 gives rise ; and we shall now be obliged, owing to the 

 uncertainty of definition of the term Philosophy, to return 

 to some extent over the ground already traversed. In the 

 present day the term Philosophy is used in a relative sense. 

 Herbert Spencer describes it as " knowledge of the highest 

 degree of generality." The search for knowledge which 

 is absolutely general has been abandoned. Since pure 

 thought, independent of any particular application, depends 

 upon absolute knowledge, it also is a logical fiction. It 

 is the process of abstraction carried to the power of n. 

 Absolute, thought would be no thought, the sleep of the 

 intellect ; just as absolute knowledge would be no knowl- 

 edge, ignorance : Nihil est intellectu quod non prius fuerit 

 in sensu. It is easy to show, with Leibnitz and Locke, that, 

 however far thought may be removed from the basis of 

 observation upon which it started, its independence of 

 observation is only a question of degree. 



Reasoning concerning the Absolute and the Infinite soon 

 leads to paradox. An old friend of Professor de Morgan 

 told me that, when the professor was harassed by people 

 who pressed him to explain things which he felt that he 

 could merely assert or deny, he would murmur : ' ' The 

 infinite circle is bounded by an infinite straight line." The 



