i 4 From Matter to Man. 



phantoms? It really does not seem possible to 

 handle such hypotheses seriously. They rather pro- 

 voke, and should obtain, as Dr Thomas Brown said, 

 "ridicule," for ridicule is always the strongest argu- 

 ment against nonsense. 



By the standards of to-day intelligence, moreover, 

 if an assertion is nonsensical to us, governed as we of 

 course must be by the highest to-day knowledge 

 (which decides what is sense and what is nonsense), 

 it should be treated as nonsensical by us, in order to 

 protect our own sanity. If we are not to stop at the 

 doorway of the comprehensible and draw our own 

 distinctions between sense and nonsense on the very 

 threshold of knowledge, there is an end to all com- 

 prehension, sense, and intelligence. Permit the 

 unintelligible in one form, it is permissible in all. 

 Far better were it to revert to our nursery rhymes, 

 and at least not pretend to an intelligence which we 

 cannot sustain. Nothing in philosophy is truly more 

 pitiable than to witness how great intellects, after 

 breaking loose from their moorings of scientific 

 reason and practical demonstration, plunge under 

 the wing of some unintelligible hypothesis into a 

 tempest of their own verbosity, where, borne aloft 

 on an inflation solely of words, and floundering 

 hopelessly in the bathos of a " peradventure," they 

 fondly imagine themselves cleaving the empyrean of 

 " pure intelligence." 



Words undoubtedly are words, but they are mean- 

 ingless save when expressing intelligible ideas, or 



