THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



All true science that deserves the name is based on 

 a collection of experiences, and consists of conclusions 

 that have been reached by a rational connection of these 

 experiences. "Only in experience is there truth," says 

 Kant. The external world is the object that acts on 

 man's organs of sense, and in the internal sense-centres of 

 the cortex of the brain these impressions are subjectively 

 transformed into presentations. The thought-centres, or 

 association centres, of the cortex (whether or no one dis- 

 tinguishes them from the sense-centres) are the real 

 organs of the mind that unite these presentations into 

 conclusions. The two methods of forming these con- 

 clusions — induction and deduction, the formation of 

 arguments and concepts, thought and consciousness — 

 make up together the cerebral function we call reason. 

 These long familiar and fundamental truths, the rec- 

 ognition of which I have described for thirty - eight 

 years as the first condition for solving the riddle of life, 

 are still far from being generally appreciated. On the 

 contrary, we find them combated by the extreme rep- 

 resentatives of both tendencies of science. On the 

 one side, the empirical and descriptive school would 

 reduce the whole task to experience, without calling 

 in the aid of philosophy ; while philosophic speculation, 

 on the other side, would dispense with experience and 

 endeavor to construct the world by pure thought. 



Starting from the correct principle that all science 

 originally has its source in experience, the representa- 

 tives of "experimental science" affirm that their task 

 consists solely in the exact observation of "facts" and 

 the classification and description of them, and that 

 philosophic speculation is nothing more than an idle 

 play of ideas. Hence this one-sided sensualism, as 

 Condillac and Hume especially maintained it, affirmed 

 that the whole action of the mind consists in a manipu- 

 lation of sense - impressions. This narrow empirical 





