THE STABILITY OF TRUTH. 339 
phasize this in its details obscures the fact of self. 
What is the vital force which holds these alliances to- 
gether, and is it after all more than another name for 
the movement of molecules? And of what are our cells 
composed? Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, we 
know, by name; but what are these in essence, and 
how are they different one from another? Does matter 
really exist? Mathematicians have claimed that all re- 
lations of ponderable matter and force 
might hold if the atoms of matter were 
not realities, but simply relations, Each 
of these atoms possessed of attraction or weight may 
be a vortex ring or eddy in the ether, of which the ulti- 
mate units have vibration but not attraction. If, there- 
fore, the body of man be an alliance of millions of ani- 
mal cells, each cell formed of millions of eddies in an 
inconceivable and impossible ether; if all things around 
us are recognised only by their effect on the most un- 
stable part of this unstable structure, then again “let 
us think small beer of ourselves and pass around the 
bottle.” 
But, again, we must remember that the conclusions 
of science represent human experience. Each fact or 
law must be expressed in terms of gen- 
eralized human experience, if it is ex- 
pressed or made intelligible at all. To 
such terms the word reality applies, and beyond such 
reality we have never gone. Apparently beyond it we 
can not go, at least in the only life we have ever known. 
Balfour’s plea for “ philosophic doubt” of the reality of 
the subject-matter of science is simply.a rhetorical trick 
of describing the known in terms of the unknown. By 
the same process we may call a fishwife an “abracada- 
bra” or an “icosahedron,” and by the same process we 
can build out of the commonest materials “an occult 
The nature of 
self. 
In terms of hu- 
man experience. 
