NECESSARY LIMITS OF INVESTIGATION. 59 



be explained ; and has a corresponding dread of Science : 

 thus evincing the profoundest of all infidelity — the fear lest 

 the truth be bad. On the other hand, the sincere man of 

 science, content to follow wherever the evidence leads him, 

 becomes by each new inquiry more profoundly convinced 

 that the Universe is an insoluble problem. Alike in the 

 external and the internal worlds, he sees himself in the 

 midst of perpetual changes, of which he can discover 

 neither the beginning nor the end. If, tracing back the 

 evolution of things, he allows himself to entertain the 

 hypothesis that all matter once existed in a diffused form, 

 he finds it utterly impossible to conceive how this came to 

 be so ; and equally, if he speculates on the future, he can 

 assign no limit to the grand succession of phenomena ever 

 unfolding themselves before him. On the other hand, if 

 he looks inward, he perceives that both terminations of 

 the thread of consciousness are beyond his grasp : he can- 

 not remember when or how consciousness commenced, 

 and he cannot examine the consciousness that at any mo- 

 ment exists; for only a state of consciousness that is 

 already past can become the object of thought, and never 

 one which is passing. 



When, again, he turns from the succession of phenom- 

 ena, external or internal, to their essential nature, he is 

 equally at fault. Though he may succeed in resolving all 

 properties of objects into manifestations of force, he is not 

 thereby enabled to realize what force is ; but finds, on the 

 contrary, that the more he thinks about it, the more he is 

 baffled. Similarly, though analysis of mental actions may 

 finally bring him down to sensations as the original ma- 

 terials out of which all thought is woven, he is none the 

 forwarder ; for he cannot in the le^st comprehend sensa- 

 tion — cannot even conceive how sensation is possible. In- 

 ward and outward things he thus discovers to be alike 

 inscrutable in their ultimate genesis and nature. He see,"? 



