104 THE CELL DOCTRINE. 



Hume's great service to humanity is his irrefragable 

 demonstration of what these limits are. Hume 

 called himself a skeptic, and therefore others cannot 

 be blamed if they apply the same title to him; but 

 that does not alter the fact that the name, with its 

 existing implications, does him gross injustice. If 

 a man asks me what the politics of the inhabitants 

 of the moon are, and I reply that I do not know; 

 that neither I, nor any one else have any means of 

 knowing; and that, under these circumstances I de- 

 cline to trouble myself about the subject at all, I do 

 not think he has any right to call me a skeptic. On 

 the contrary, in replying thus, I conceive that I am 

 simply honest and truthful, and show a proper regard 

 for the economy of time. So Hume's strong and 

 subtle intellect takes up a great many problems 

 about which we are naturally curious, and shows us 

 that they are essentially questions of lunar politics, 

 in their essence incapable of being answered, and 

 therefore not worth the attention of men who have 

 work to do in the world." .... 



"If we find that the ascertainment of the order of 

 nature is facilitated by using one terminology, or one 

 set of symbols, rather than another, it is our clear 

 duty to use the former, and no harm can accrue so 

 long as we bear in mind that we are dealing merely 

 with terms and symbols. In itself it is of little 

 moment whether we express the phenomena of mat- 

 ter in terms of spirit, or the phenomena of spirit in 

 terms of matter ; matter may be regarded as a form 

 of thought, thought may be regarded as a property 

 of matter each statement has a certain relative 



