6 



SCIENCE. 



manner when the savage designs, as he often does, most 

 ingenious traps for the capture of his prey, and so baits 

 them as to attract the animals he desires to catch, he is 

 counting first on the constancy and uniformity of physical 

 causation, and, secondly, on the profoundly different action 

 of the motives which determine the conduct of creatures 

 having Life and Will. But of neither of these as general 

 truths does he know anything, and of one of them at least, 

 not even the greatest philosophers have reached the full 

 depth of meaning. Nevertheless, it would be a great error 

 to suppose that the savage, because he has no conception 

 of the general truth involved in his conduct, has been guided 

 in that conduct by anything in the nature of chance or acci- 

 dent. His intuitions have been right, and have involved 

 so much perception of truth as is necessary to carry him 

 along the little way he requires to travel, because the mind 

 in which those intuitions lie is a product and a part of 

 Nature— a product and part of that great systtm of things 

 which is held together by laws intelligible to Mind— laws 

 which the human mind has been constructed to feel even 

 when it cannot clearly see. Moreover, when these laws 

 come to be clearly seen, they are seen only because the 

 mind has organs adjusted to the perception of them, and 

 because it finds in its own mechanism corresponding se- 

 quences of thought. 



It was the work of a great German metaphysician towards 

 the close of the last century to discriminate and define more 

 systematically than had been done before some at least of 

 those higher elements of thought which, over and above 

 the mere perception of external things, the mind thus con- 

 tributes out of its own structure to the fabric of know- 

 ledge. In doing this he did immortal service — proving that 

 when men talked of "experience" being the source of 

 knowledge, they forgot that the whole process of experience 

 presupposes the action of innate laws of thought, without 

 which experience can neither gather its facts nor reach their 

 interpretation. "Experience," as Kant most truly said, is 

 nothing but a " synthesis of intuitions" — a building up or 

 putting together of conceptions which the access of exter- 

 nal Nature finds ready to be awakened in the mind. The 

 whole of this process is determined by the mind's own laws 

 — a process in which even observation of outward fact must 

 take its place according to principles of arrangement in 

 which alone all explanations of them consists, and out of 

 which any understanding them is impossible. 



And yet this great fact of a large part of our knowledge 

 — and that the most important part — coming to us out of 

 the very furniture and constitution of the mind itself, has 

 been so expressed and presented in the language of philos- 

 ophy as rather to undermine than to establish our confi- 

 dence in the certainty of knowledge. For if the mind is 

 so spoken of and represented as to suggest the idea of 

 something apart from the general system of Nature, and if 

 its laws of thought are looked upon as "forms " or molds 

 into which, by some artificial arrangement or by some 

 mechanical necess : ty, everything from outside must be 

 squeezed and made to fit — then it will naturally occur to us 

 to doubt whether conceptions cut out and manufactured 

 under such conditions can be any trustworthy representation 

 of the truth. Such, unfortunately, has been the mode of 

 representation adopted by many philosophers — and such 

 accordingly has been the result of their teaching. This is 

 the great source of error in every form of the Idealistic 

 philosophy, but it is a source of error which can be per- 

 fectly eliminated, leaving untouched and undoubted the 

 large bod)' of truths which has made that philosophy attrac- 

 tive to so many powerful minds. We have only to take 

 care that in expressing those truths we do not use metaphors 

 which are misleading. We have only to remember that 

 we must regard the mind and the laws of its operation in 

 the light of that most assured truth — the Unity of Nature. 

 The mind has no " molds" which have not themselves been 

 molded on the realities of the universe — no " forms" which 

 it did not receive as a part and a consequence of a 

 unity with the rest of Nature. Its conceptions are not 

 manufactured ; they are developed. They are not made ; 

 they simply grow. The order of the laws of thought under 

 which it renders intelligible to itself all the phenomena of 

 the universe, is not an order which it invents, but an order 

 which it simply feels and sees. And this " vision and 

 faculty divine" is a necessary consequence of its congeni- 



tal relations with the whole system of Nature — from being 

 bone of its bone — flesh of its flesh — from breathing its at- 

 mosphere, from living in its light, and from having with it 

 a thousand points of contact visible and invisible, more 

 than we can number or understand. 



And yet so subtle are the suggestions of the human 

 spirit in disparagement of its own powers — so near and 

 ever present to us is that reg on which belongs to the un- 

 satisfied Reserve of Power — that the very fact of our knowl- 

 edge arising out of our organic relations with the rest of 

 Nature has been seiztd upon as only casting new discredit 

 on all that we seem to know. Because all our knowledge 

 arises out of these relations, therefore, it is said, all our 

 knowledge of things must be itself relative; and relative 

 knowledge is not knowledge of " things in themselves." 

 Such is the argument of metaphysicians — an argument re- 

 peated with singular unanimity by philosophers of almost 

 tvery school of thought. By some it has been made the 

 basis of religious proof. By some it has been made the 

 basis of a reasoned skepticism. By some it has been used 

 simply to foil attacks upon belief. The real truth is that it 

 is an argument useless for any purpose whatever, because 

 it is not i t self true. The distinction between knowledge 

 of things in their relations, and knowledge of things " in 

 themselves," is a distinction without a meaning. In meta- 

 physics the assertion that we can never attain to any knowl- 

 edge ol things in themselves does not mean simply that we 

 know things only in a few relations out of many. It does 

 not mean even that there may be and probably are a great 

 many relations which we have not faculties enabling us to 

 conceive. All this is quite true, and a most important 

 truth. But the metaphysical distinction is quite different. 

 It affirms that if we kn°w things in every one of the rela- 

 tions that affect them, we should still be no nearer than be- 

 fore to a knowledge of " things themselves." " It is proper 

 to observe," says Sir W. Hamilton, " that had we faculties 

 equal in number to all the possible modes of existence, 

 whether of mind or matter, still would our knowledge of 

 mind or matter be only relative. If material existence could 

 exhibit ten thousand phenomena, — if we possessed ten 

 thousand senses to apprehend these ten thousand phenom- 

 ena of material existence, of existence absolutely and in 

 itself we should then be as ignorant as we are at present."* 

 The conception here that there is something to be known 

 about things in which they are not presented as in any rela- 

 tion to anything else. It affirms that there are certain ulti- 

 mate entities in Nature to which all phenomena are due. 

 and yet which can be thought of as having no relation to 

 these phenomena, or to ourselves, or to any other existence 

 whatever. Now as the very idea ol knowledge consists in 

 the perception of relations, this affirmation is, in the purest 

 sense of the word, nonsense — that is to say, it's a series ot 

 words which have either no meaning at all or a meaning 

 which is self-contradictor)'. It belongs to the class of pro- 

 positions which throw just discredit on metaphysics — mere 

 verbal propositions, pietending to deal with conceptions 

 which are no conceptions at all, but empty sounds. The 

 " unconditioned," we are told, " is unthinkable ; " but words 

 which are unthinkable had better be also unspeakable, or at 

 least unspoken. It is altogether untrue that we are com- 

 pelled to believe in the existence of anything which is " un- 

 conditioned " — in Matter with no qualities — in Minds with 

 no character — in a God with no attributes. Even the me- 

 taphysicians who dwell on this distinction between the 

 Relative and Unconditioned admit that it is one to which 

 no idea can be attached. Yet, in spite of this admission, 

 they proceed to found many inferences upon it, as if it had 

 an intelligible meaning. Those who have not been accus- 

 tomed to metaphysical literature could hardly believe the 

 flagrant unreason which is common on this subject. It can- 

 not bo better illustrated than by quoting the words in which 

 this favorite doctrine is expressed by Sir William Hamilton. 

 Speaking of our knowledge of Matter he says : "It is a name 

 for something known — for that which appears to us under 

 the forms of extension, solidity, divisibility, figure, motion, 

 roughness, smoothness, color, heat, cold," etc. " But," he 

 goes on to say, " as these phenomena appear only in conjunc- 

 tion, we are compelled by the constitution of our nature to 

 think them conjoined in and by something; and as they 



* " Lectures," vol. i. p. 145. 



