68 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
possess—the achievements of two thousand years of human effort. 
Not only geometry—all that has survived to us of philosophical 
value from the antique world—but the basis of positive dynamics, 
as handed down from Galileo and Newton and Boscovich and 
Dalton, are apparently undermined, for all that gives them intel- 
lectual value—their certainty—unless an effort be made in the 
neglected field of philosophy. With strange inconsistency these 
advocates par excellence of the experiential origin of knowledge 
are found in the same breath promulgating as possible truth mat- 
ters not only non-experiential, but not representable in ideas de- 
rived from or verifiable by experience, and avowedly originating 
not from inductive generalizations—the only source of knowledge— 
but in purely deductive processes in the old scholastic way, from 
logical premises of bald assumption. In a similar way, in the 
hands of the Greek sophist, language, a good servant, became a 
vicious master, and made a chaos of all ethical achievement. A 
remnant of knowledge, fortunately expressed, not in verbal, but 
diagrammatic logic—geometry—was left, but only to fall now by 
the hands of similar iconoclasts, armed with more potent destruc- 
tiveness, in its full flower and fruit of twenty centuries of unmo- 
lested growth. 
It is time, therefore, to get back to Baconian ground, and while 
using for its legitimate purposes the magnificent modern machinery 
of analytical investigation in the field of abstract continuity—ex- 
tension, motion, duration—not attempt to conjure with it as a source 
of objective revelation, which no mere machinery can be. <A scaf- 
fold of » dimensions is as useless to the geometer as to the archi- 
tect. To assume matter as continuous, simply because of the posses- 
sion of a potent engine for the investigation of continuities, is to re- 
peat the practice of certain quack specialists, who are prone to diag- 
nose nearly every form of disease as a variety of their own peculiar 
specialty. And to interview the symbols of a mathematical logic 
for the prime definition of a fundamental objectivity, like force, is 
to revert to a barren source of knowledge, by an obsolete process 
in philosophy, and bar all progress in anything but abstract tech- 
nique. 
The paper was discussed by Mr. W. B. Taytor and Mr. Kum- 
MELL. 
