PESSIMISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE. 217 



into the deep waters of ontological speculation, where it 

 speedily and surely got sucked into the circular currents 

 and bottomless vortices of empty metaphysical contro- 

 versies respecting Being, Existence, Becoming, First 

 Cause, Real Substance, and the like. It was urged 

 viciously into a region of insoluble enigmas and trans- 

 cendental riddles, where the brain grows dizzy with 

 " thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls," which are 

 pressed upon it ; into a region where light or knowledge 

 never comes or has come since men first began to specu- 

 late; into a land of chimeras dire, where the mind 

 wandered perplexed and lost, discussing ceaselessly, as 

 Milton's fallen angels on the " hill retired," in the infernal 

 abodes, the whole dismal circle of metaphysical enigmas 

 "providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, fixed fate, 

 free-will, foreknowledge absolute," with others similar; 

 and still, as ever, the mind of men, as the mind of the 

 evil spirits, could find " no end, in wandering mazes lost." 

 At length Positive Science came, with her true methods 

 of interrogating Nature, and showed man a means of 

 escape from the fatal fascinations of metaphysics. The 

 whole vicious circle of metaphysical problems might be 

 evaded, and real profitable questions might be substituted 

 for them, sufficiently difficult to attract man's energies, 

 and yet not insoluble. Or if the old questions of the 

 origin and final goal of the universe and man, of free- 

 will and immortality, must still engage the mind of 

 man ; if the metaphysical virus is still so far left in the 

 blood through heredity, that it will still raise the old 

 cjuestions, let them be attempted from the scientific side, 

 by the scientific and experimental methods of inquiry 

 and proof, with deductive reasoning resting on a sound 

 basis of inductively ascertained facts, which will give a 

 certain or probable conclusion according to the weight 



