K-A-jstsa-S city 



Review of Science and Industry, 



A MONTHLY RECORD OF PROGRESS IN 



SCIENCE, MECHANIC ARTS AND LITERATURE. 



VOL VIII. DECEMBER, 1884. NO: 8. 



PHILOSOPHY. 



A PLEA FOR THE OCCULT. 1 



HON. R. T. VAN HORN. 



Our culture is drifting to specialty — is becoming one-sided. Our science 

 and philosophy are specialized. Science confines itself to merely physical things, 

 ignoring ethics ; while theology restricts its teaching to the future life of man. 

 There is no unity, each following its own lines of thought. There can be no 

 completeness by this method. It is unscientific because all we can know of 

 physical phenomena is from the action of unseen force. Nor can we compre- 

 hend the unseen by passing the facts and laws of the physical world. Man can 

 never reach true knowledge until he studies both by the light which this insepa- 

 rable relation suggests. It is from this fact that the subject of this paper is 

 chosen — the occult in nature. 



And it is well before beginning a topic to know the value of words. Oc- 

 cult in its strict etymology means to hide— hidden. Its popular use, including 

 the so-called supernatural or superstitious, is not the sense in which it will be 

 employed in what follows. In the newer philosophy there is no such thing as the 

 supernatural. The ancient philosophers used it in the sense of the principle of 

 things— or the unseen in nature as distinguished from the manifest. But modern 



1 Read November 15, 1884, before the Kansas City Academy of Sciences. 

 VIII-27 



