ch. xi.] THE QUESTION STATED. 271 



result we shall find that universal generalization to be based, 

 the validity of which we have afterwards to certify by its 

 agreement with inductions drawn from the several groups of 

 phenomena with which the concrete sciences deal. 



Here, before proceeding further, we may fitly pause for a 

 moment, to relieve a puzzling doubt which may ere this have 

 disturbed the mind of the reader. Did we not elaborately 

 prove, in our opening chapter, that concerning the move- 

 ments of molecules and their aggregation into masses, not 

 only nothing can be known, but no tenable hypothesis can 

 be framed ? Did we not, with full knowledge of what 

 we were doing, hang up as the very sign-board of our 

 <ppovTt(TT7]ptov or philosophy- shop, the proposition that all 

 that either sense or reason can tell us concerning the inti- 

 mate structure of a block of wood is utterly and hopelessly 

 delusive? Did we not show that the hypothesis of attractive 

 and repulsive forces lands us straightway in an insoluble 

 contradiction ? Did we not find it impossible to get rid of 

 the difficulties which surround the conception of an atom or 

 a molecule, whether regarded as divisible or as indivisible ? 

 And did we not conclude that the conception of matter 

 acting upon matter is a pseud-conception which can by no 

 effort be construed in consciousness ? — Yet in spite of all 

 this, it may be said, we are about to base the entire following 

 Synthesis upon preliminary conclusions relating to the move- 

 ments of molecules and their aggregation into masses ; we 

 are likely to draw inferences from the assumed intimate 

 structure of certain bodies ; we have inevitably to make use 

 of the hypothesis of attractive and repulsive forces ; we 

 shall constantly have tacit reference to the conception of 

 atoms and molecules ; and we shall be obliged to take 

 account of matter as constrained in its movements by other 

 neighbouring matter. Is there not here, it may be asked, a 

 reductio ad absurdum, either of the Synthesis which is to 

 follow, or of the initial arguments upon which the claims of 



