_- as re 
eal 
ADDRESS. 11 
conceived that Newton experimented. To it he applied his laws of motion ; 
of it he predicated universal gravitation. Nor was the case greatly altered 
when science became as much preoccupied with the movements of molecules 
as it was with those of planets. For molecules and atoms, whatever else 
might be said of them, were at least pieces of matter, and, like other 
pieces of matter, possessed those ‘primary’ qualities supposed to be 
characteristic of all matter, whether found in large masses or in small. 
But the electric theory which we have been considering carries us into 
a new region altogether. It does not confine itself to accounting for the 
secondary qualities by the primary, or the behaviour of matter in bulk 
by the behaviour of matter in atoms ; it analyses matter, whether molar 
or molecular, into something which is not matter at all. The atom is 
now no more than the relatively vast theatre of operations in which 
minute monads perform their orderly evolutions ; while the monads 
themselves are not regarded as units of matter, but as units of elec- 
tricity ; so that matter is not merely explained, but is explained away. 
Now the point to which I desire to call attention is not to be sought 
in the great divergence between matter as thus conceived by the 
physicist and matter as the ordinary man supposes himself to know it, 
between matter as it is perceived and matter as it really is, but to the 
fact that the first of these two quite inconsistent views is wholly based 
on the second. 
This is surely something of a paradox. We claim to found all our 
scientific opinions on experience ; and the experience on which we found 
our theories of the physical universe is our sense-perception of that 
universe. That ts experience ; and in this region of belief there is no 
other. Yet the conclusions which thus profess to be entirely founded 
upon experience are to all appearance fundamentally opposed to it ; our 
knowledge of reality is based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we 
use in describing it to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted 
from anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and 
Nature compels us to entertain. 
We here touch the fringe of a series of problems with which induc- 
tive logic ought to deal ; but which that most unsatisfactory branch of 
philosophy has systematically ignored. This is no fault of men of 
science. They are occupied in the task of making discoveries, not in 
that of analysing the fundamental presuppositions which the very pos- 
sibility of making discoveries implies. Neither is it the fault of trans- 
cendental metaphysicians. Their speculations flourish on a different 
level of thought ; their interest in a philosophy of nature is lukewarm : 
and howsoever the questions in which they are chiefly concerned be 
answered, it is by no means certain that the answers will leave the 
humbler difficulties at which I have hinted either nearer to or further 
from asolution. But though men of science and idealists stand acquitted, 
the same can hardly be said of empirical philosophers, So far from solving 
