COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



ments of social existence ? And this painful 

 attitude of the mind, prompting men to fresh 

 investigation of the order of nature and to new 

 social rearrangements, is the stimulus to a new 

 and closer adaptation. 



Such is the function of scepticism in the 

 community, and such also is its function in the 

 individual. A person, for instance, is educated 

 in an environment of Presbyterian theology, 

 accepting without question all the doctrines of 

 Calvinism. By and by his environment enlarges. 

 Facts in science or in history, methods of in- 

 duction, canons of criticism present themselves 

 to his mind as things irreconcilable with his old 

 creed. Hence painful doubt, entailing efforts 

 to escape by modifying the creed to suit new 

 mental exigencies. Hence eager study and fur- 

 ther enlargement of the environment, causing 

 fresh disturbance of equilibrium and renewed 

 doubt resulting in further adaptation. And 

 so the process continues — until, if the person 

 in question be sufficiently earnest and suffi- 

 ciently fortunate, the environment enlarges so 

 far as to comprehend the most advanced science 

 of the day ; and the process of adaptation goes 

 on until an approximate equilibrium is attained 

 between the order of conceptions and the order 

 of phenomena, — and scepticism, having dis- 

 charged its function, exists no longer, save in 

 so far as it may be said to survive in the in- 



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