18 THE EIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



once dispose of this dangerous error. Emotion has 

 nothing whatever to do with the attainment of truth. 

 That which we prize under the name of "emotion" 

 is an elaborate activity of the brain, which consists of 

 feelings of like and dislike, motions of assent and 

 dissent, impulses of desire and aversion. It may be 

 influenced by the most diverse activities of the 

 organism, b}' the cravings of the senses and the 

 muscles, the stomach, the sexual organs, etc. The 

 interests of truth are far from promoted by these 

 conditions and vacillations of emotion ; on the contrary, 

 such circumstances often disturb that reason which 

 alone is adapted to the pursuit of truth, and frequently 

 mar its perceptive power. No cosmic problem is 

 solved, or even advanced, by the cerebral function we 

 call emotion. And the same must be said of the 

 so-called "revelation," and of the "truths of faith" 

 which it is supposed to communicate ; they are based 

 entirely on a deception, consciously or unconsciously, 

 as we shall see in the sixteenth chapter. 



We must welcome as one of the most fortunate 

 steps in the direction of a solution of the great cosmic 

 problems the fact that of recent years there is a growing 

 tendency to recognise the two paths which alone 

 lead thereto — experience and thought, or speculation 

 — to be of equal value, and mutually complementary. 

 Philosophers have come to see that pure speculation 

 ■ — such, for instance, as Plato and Hegel employed for 

 the construction of their idealist systems — does not 

 lead to knowledge of reality. On the other hand, 

 scientists have been convinced that mere experience — 

 such as Bacon and Mill, for example, made the basis 

 of their realist systems — is insufficient of itself for 

 a complete philosophy. For these two great paths of 



