9 o 



METAPHYSICS 



in obedience to, the law of never-ending and absolute 

 necessity. 



Imaginations proceeding on lines of actual knowledge, 

 leading back into antiquity, showing in full significance 

 their present proportions, and indicating unmistakably the 

 trend of their probable progress beyond the confines of 

 our own immediate time and place, can be safely followed 

 so long as the law of probability, so to speak, enables 

 or will enable the imaginer to sustain powers of reasoned 

 thought. This latter essay, in fact, constitutes the last 

 and highest endeavour to scale that line of demarcation 

 which lies between the present and the future, and between 

 the worlds of sense and faith. If, therefore, any searcher 

 after truth has so mastered the subject that it has become 

 a real possession to him or her, and that it has at last 

 ceased to accrete fresh truth, and has become, so to speak, 

 shelved, let him or her take fresh inspiration and en- 

 couragement from the unexhausted, or, it may be, unused 

 faculty of imagination, which he or she may or must 

 possess, and let that faculty, founded on the bed of 

 -complete knowledge of the subject in question, coruscate 

 on, and light up the subject, so that in the unwonted 

 radiance cast on it, it may reveal a way or ways to fresh 

 discoveries, and afford a fresh setting of the subject in its 

 matrix of surrounding truth. 



To particularise, let us take the example of the modern 

 method of clinical diagnosis of disease. Since the days of 

 the Fathers of Medicine, down to the termination of the 

 middle or dark ages in Europe, the method of diagnosis 

 of disease was of the most empirical and arbitrary character, 

 being deduced from the appearance of certain signs or 

 symptoms, which had come to have a settled place in the 

 category of morbid phenomena, and the occurrence and 

 sequence of which determined the generic names of disease. 

 This method sufficed to meet the equally empirically guided 

 treatment of disease, until the desire for more exact know- 

 ledge of the significance and meaning of these disease 

 entities resulted in the foundations of anatomical science, 

 then physiology, and ultimately pathology, being laid, the 

 evolution of all of which has been characterised by some- 

 what rigid progression, along the lines of observation and 



