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GENERAL MEETING. 00 
Cartesians. These also are still held to be inconceivable by certain 
disciples of metaphysical methods and axiomatic by others. Suen 
mental attitudes should lead us to believe that simplicity has been 
arrived at in all these cases and the boundaries of explainable 
knowledge reached, where inconceivability necessarily begins. 
It has been said that paradox is born either of confusion of 
thought, or of knowledge, or confusion of statement arising out of 
the imperfection or subtlety of the verbal vehicle of thought. Thus, 
as Clerk-Maxwell points out, the celebrated arguments of Zeno of 
Elea, establishing the inconceivability of motion, represented in 
the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, were unanswerable and un- 
answered until Aristotle showed, some half century later, that du- 
ration is continuous and incommensurable by numerical methods 
in the same sense that extension is. The old logical dilemma of the 
irresistible force encountering the immovable body was insoluble to 
the Greek mind, both from lack of physical knowledge and lack of 
verbal clearness of statement. The acute sophist knew not the 
nature of force, the constitution of bodies, the conservation, trans- 
formation, and dissipation of energy, and consequently knew not 
the refuge and escape from the dilemma contained in the percep- 
tion of the conversion of molar energy into heat energy, expansion, 
and dissipation. The resources of verbal subtlety and of inner 
consciousness failed, as they always do. Something of the same 
difficulty remains in modern problems, where observation and strict 
verification are, from the nature of the problem, inapplicable, or 
where the confusion arises from the still-existing imperfection of 
language, or, again, where generalizations, both clearly made 
out and clearly formulated, have not passed into the instinctive 
popular apprehension. The modern dilemma of the inconceiva- 
bility of infinite or finite space is, I take it, due to the metaphysical 
form of the statement. For when we reflect that the ideas of im- 
mensity and of infinitesimal resolvability are but abstract generali- 
zations of the merely relative continuities, extension, distance, and 
dimension, which are in their turn but abstractions of the sense- 
perceptions, form, translation, and volume, the statement becomes 
intelligible and entirely conceivable, and I think, though with 
deference, saves geometry; that is, the universality of that system 
of inductive postulates regarding the relations of extension and 
inferences therefrom, known as geometry to the Greek philosophy, 
