ON THE CONCEPTION OF THE GREAT REALITY. 225 



knows most liow little he knows. In this frame of mind let us 

 now examine our surroundings. 



We are living in a world of continuous and multitudinous 

 changes, in fact, without change we could have no cognizance of 

 our surroundings, we should have no consciousness of living ; 

 w^e have become so accustomed to certain sensations that we 

 are apt to take them as facts and scoff at the suggestion that 

 they are non-realities. I propose, however, to show that what 

 we perceive are not realities ; and true conception of our 

 surroundings depends upon the knowledge which we can bring 

 to bear to interpret the meaning of these sensations. It is only 

 in response to our conscientious endeavours to form new 

 concepts that knowledge is being daily revealed to us ; the 

 more we progress in knowledge the more we see that perception 

 alone without knowledge leads to false concepts, and these in 

 their turn if held dogmatically create fatal obstacles and 

 difficulties to our progress towards the appreciation of both the 

 natural and the supernatural. Let me give you a few examples 

 of this in the natural. 



In early times the sun and the stars were seen to revolve 

 round the earth once every day, and, without knowledge of 

 astronomy, this was taken for granted as an absolute fact ; later 

 on, however, it was noted that the stars never changed their 

 relative positions ; this necessitated a new concept, namely, that 

 they were fixed on the inner surface of a huge globe. This 

 false concept brought other difficulties into play, the question 

 arose as to what was beyond the globe, and also the difficulty 

 that the stars as well as the sun were found to be at such an 

 •enormous distance from the earth that their rates of motion 

 were quite inconceivable ; even in the case of the sun the 

 motion represented over twenty-five million miles per hour and 

 the apparent motion of the stars was thousands of times faster 

 than light travels. These ditticulties were not swept away 

 until by the advance of knowdedge, the falsity of conception 

 based only upon appearance was made manifest and it was seen 

 that it was the earth which moved and not the stars ; even then, 

 owing to its supposed antagonism to what w^as stated in the 

 Bible, the new conception was opposed with great bitterness, it 

 l3eing long looked upon and denounced as a sacrilegious 

 invention. 



Our present conception that the earth turns round on its 

 axis once every day and rolls in its orbit round the sun once 

 in every year may be called a reality to our finite senses ; but I 

 shall show later on that, except for the finiteness of our senses 



