COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



now enables us to make with perfect confidence 

 these audacious assertions, we should be able to 

 determine the proper motions of stars which 

 present no parallax ! No example could more 

 forcibly illustrate the rashness of prophetically- 

 setting limits to the possible future advance of 

 science. Here are truths which, within the mem- 

 ory of young men, seemed wholly out of the 

 reach of observation, but which are already fa- 

 miliar, and will soon become an old story. 



I believe it was Comte's neglect of psycho- 

 logical analysis which caused him to be thus 

 over-conservative in accepting new discoveries, 

 and over-confident in setting limits to scien- 

 tific achievement. He did not clearly distin- 

 guish between the rashness of metaphysics and 

 the well-founded boldness of science. He was 

 deeply impressed with the futility of wasting 

 time and mental energy in constructing unveri- 

 fiable hypotheses ; but he did not sufficiently 

 distinguish between hypotheses which are tem- 

 porarily unverifiable from present lack of the 

 means of observation, and those which are per- 

 manently unverifiable from the very nature of 

 the knowing process. There is no ground for 

 supposing that Comte ever thoroughly under- 

 stood why we cannot know the Absolute and 

 the Infinite. He knew, as a matter of historical 

 fact, that all attempts to obtain such knowledge 

 had miserably failed, or ended in nothing better 

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