THE STABILITY OF TRUTH. 



339 



phasize this in its details obscures the fact of self. 

 What is the vital force which holds these alliances to- 

 gether, and is it after all more than another name for 

 the movement of molecules ? And of what are our cells 

 composed ? Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, we 

 know, by name ; but what are these in essence, and 

 how are they different one from another ? Does matter 

 really exist ? Mathematicians have claimed that all re- 

 lations of ponderable matter and force 

 might hold if the atoms of matter were 

 not realities, but simply relations. Each 

 of these atoms possessed of attraction or weight may 

 be a vortex ring or eddy in the ether, of which the ulti- 

 mate units have vibration but not attraction. If, there- 

 fore, the body of man be an alliance of millions of ani- 

 mal cells, each cell formed of millions of eddies in an 

 inconceivable and impossible ether ; if all things around 

 us are recognised only by their effect on the most un- 

 stable part of this unstable structure, then again " let 

 us think small beer of ourselves and pass around the 

 bottle." 



But, again, we must remember that the conclusions 



of science represent human experience. Each fact or 



law must be expressed in terms of gen- 



In terms of hu- eralized human ex p e rience, if it is ex- 



man experience. 



pressed or made intelligible at all. To 



such terms the word reality applies, and beyond such 

 reality we have never gone. Apparently beyond it we 

 can not go, at least in the only life we have ever known. 

 Balfour's plea for " philosophic doubt" of the reality of 

 the subject-matter of science is simply a rhetorical trick 

 of describing the known in terms of the unknown. By 

 the same process we may call a fishwife an "abracada- 

 bra " or an " icosahedron," and by the same process we 

 can build out of the commonest materials " an occult 



