106 STONEY—UNIVERSE OF REAL EXISTENCES. [April 3, 
There are other reasons also why the inquiry should be taken up 
by scientific men. The difficulties which have to be encountered 
are perhaps not so much intrinsic as collateral, They all arise from 
the circumstances under which we, men, have to carry out the in- 
quiry, and are of a kind with which scientific men are better fitted 
to cope than others. A very serious liability to error is consequent 
upon the excessively secluded position of the human mind in the 
universe of existing things. How indirect and how slender the 
connections will appear in the sequel. This creates illusions greater 
than those experienced by the old astronomers who were misled by 
man’s being tied to an earth that seemed to them to be stationary. 
Another chief source of our difficulties is that we have to enter on 
this study hampered by crude beliefs in which we have been brought 
up, which are embedded into the language we are obliged to use, 
and in which we habitually think; but which the inquiry shows to 
be a jumble of truth and error. These.we must make it our busi- 
ness to correct, retaining the germ of truth in each, and by slow 
degrees acquiring the power of amending, promptly and without 
effort, all those parts of these beliefs which require correction. We 
are far from having done enough when we merely become aware of 
the errors; nor is it even enough that we shall have discovered 
what ought to take their place. We have not accomplished our 
task till it becomes our second nature to do this habitually and 
without premeditation, with regard to all that is about us and all 
that is within us. This takes time. But when it is accomplished 
the reward is great. A special difficulty arises from our being 
obliged to use some one of the languages that can be understood by 
our fellow-men. Every language that has been devised by man 
implies mistaken views in ontology ; and that not occasionally, for 
every human language is permeated by these errors. 
Now, students of natural science, men who have had an exten- 
sive training in the study of nature, and especially those who have 
devoted themselves mainly to the dynamical and physical aspects. 
of that study, are better equipped for contending successfully with 
these difficulties than are their fellow-students whose main training 
has been confined to the tiny plot which lies within the ring-fence 
that surrounds the works of man—the languages he has devised, his. 
literature and history, his music, poetry, architecture, painting and. 
sculpture, his jurisprudence, his moral relations, the metaphysics of 
his mind, and so on; in fact, all branches of what in our universi- 
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