798 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 



Heraclitus declared the unaided senses 

 "give a fraud and a lie." 



Now, our speaker will asli, what has 

 been and is the behavior of intellect in the 

 presence of svich contradiction? Observe, 

 he will say, that it is intellect, and not sen- 

 sibility, that detects the contradiction. Of 

 the irrationality in question sensibility re- 

 mains insensible. The data among which 

 the contradiction subsists are indeed rooted 

 in the sensible world, they inhere in the 

 world of matter, but the contradiction it- 

 self is known only to the logical faculty 

 called intellect. Observe also, he will say, 

 and the observation is important, that such 

 contradictions do not compel the intellect to 

 any activity whatever intended to preserve 

 the life of the living organism to which the 

 intellect is functionally attached. That is 

 a lesson we have from our physical kin, the 

 beasts. What, then, lias the intellect done 

 because of or about the contradiction ? Has 

 it gone on all these centuries, as our critics 

 would have us believe, trying to "think 

 matter," as if it did not know that matter, 

 being irrational, is not thinkable? Far 

 from it, he will say, the intellect is no such 

 ass. 



What it has done, instead of endlessly 

 and stupidly besieging the illogical world of 

 sensible magnitudes with the machinery of 

 logic, what it has done, our lecturer will 

 say, is this: it has created for itself 

 another world. It has not rationalized the 

 world of sensible magnitudes. That, it 

 knows, can not be done. It has discerned 

 the ineradicable contradictions inherent in 

 them, and by means of its creative power 

 of conception it has made a new world, a 

 world of conceptual magnitudes that, like 

 the continua of mathematics, are so con- 

 structed by the spiritual architect and so 

 endowed by it as to be free alike from the 

 contradictions of the sensible world and 

 from all thresholds that could give them 



birth. Indeed conception, to speak meta- 

 phorically in terms borrowed from the 

 realm of sense, is a kind of infinite sensi- 

 bility, transcending any finite distinction, 

 difference or threshold, however minute or 

 fine. And, now, our speaker will say, it is 

 such magnitudes, magnitudes created by 

 intellect and not those discovered by sense, 

 though the two varieties are frequently not 

 discriminated by their names, it is such 

 conceptual magnitudes that constitute the 

 subject-matter of science. If the magni- 

 tudes of science, apart from their rational- 

 ity, often bear in conformation a kind of 

 close resemblance to the magnitudes of 

 sense, what is the meaning of the fact? It 

 means, contrary to the view of Bergson but 

 in accord with that of Poincare, that the 

 free creative artist, intellect, though it is 

 not constrained, yet has chosen to be 

 guided, in so far as its task allows, by facts 

 of sense. Thus we have, for one example 

 among many, conceptual space and sensible 

 space so much alike in conformation that, 

 though one of them is rational and the other 

 is not, the undiscriminating hold them as 

 the same. 



And now, our lecturer will ask, for we 

 are nearing the goal, what then is the mo- 

 tive and aim of this creative activity of the 

 intellect? Evidently it is not to preserve 

 and promote the life of the human body, 

 for animals flourish without the aid of con- 

 cepts and despite the contradictions in the 

 world of sense. The aim is, he will say, to 

 preserve and to promote the life of the in- 

 tellect itself. In a realm infected with ir- 

 rationality, with omnipresent contradic- 

 tions of the laws of thought, intellect can 

 not live, much less flourish ; in the world of 

 sense, it has no proper subject-matter, no 

 home, no life. To live, to flourish, it must 

 be able to think, to think in accordance 

 with the laws of its being. It is stimulated 

 and its activity sustained by two opposite 



