178 
force as resulting from personality is, if I mistake not, most 
correct, but what that Personality is, whose will alone is force, 
is not so easily comprehended. 
29. If the man would preserve in its freshness the know- 
ledge which he has acquired in his youth, he must continually 
be adding to the store. It is necessary that he should keep 
himself au courant with the age, in its continual additions to 
the accumulated experience of mankind. He must be ever 
at school and advancing, whilst never forgetting the grounding 
at his entrance . 
30. When a boy is sent to school he finds that some force 
is needed to overcome the difficulties that bestrew the path of 
learning. If he has a will to learn, the force needed is found 
in himself ; and perhaps he may find supplementary help in 
the force of example, that is, in mind acting upon mind ; but 
if thoroughly idle, he must be forced to learn. But whilst he 
complains of the force employed to subject his will to the will 
of another, he is never so stupid as to personify force, and to 
call the cane that corrects him, or the hand that wields it, 
force. 
31. But our so-called “ thinkers” continually make this 
mistake, and personify Force . Nature also, and Natural 
Selection and Law * are so many gods or goddesses, the 
idola tribus whom our wise men agnostically worship ; losing 
sight of the Causa causarum in the search after the intermediate 
causes, as if they were the all-important realities. 
32. It is needful, then, to be quite sure that we attach 
definite meanings to the terms we employ, and that we do not 
mistake words for things, nor yet transform nouns-substantive 
into substantial realities. In many metaphysical treatises 
there is not even so much of substance as to fill a nut-shell, 
but then unfortunately it is substance capable of almost infinite 
expansion. 
33. If I were to write a work on “ Harmonics ” ; seeking to 
illustrate analogous properties in sound and in light, whilst 
myself totally ignorant of the science of music, I should justly 
expose myself to the reproach of conceit. But I find continu- 
* No word is more misused than “ Law.” “ Law, in the Aristotelian 
system, implies a consciousness of obligation which exists whether realised 
or not in practice. Law, in the Baconian system, means a uniform sequence, 
which exists only as it is realised in practice ” (Mansell’s Int. to Aldrich). 
And elsewhere : — “ The laws of Nature are simply general statements con- 
cerning the powers and properties which have come under our observation ** 
(Soisset, Modern Pantheism, vol. i. p. 169 ; see also Argyll’s Beign of 
Law. 
