Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/439

Rh our mind's eye objectively a spiritual substance, we simply deny the properties of matter as reported to us by our senses, and hence the product of our phantasy proves incapable of causal action and reaction with matter.

How profoundly in error, then, are they who, often in a tone of scientific pharisaism, lament our blindness in trying to account for the universe without final causes which so easily and so beautifully solve all problems, even those of ethics! These people simply show that at bottom they are ignorant of what knowledge means. For us there is no other knowledge save mechanical knowledge, however beggarly a substitute that may be for true knowledge, and consequently there is only one truly scientific form of thought, the physico-mathematical one. Hence there can be no more mischievous illusion than that whereby we are led to believe that we explain the teleology of organic nature by calling to our aid an immaterial intelligence, conceived in our own likeness, and working for ends. It is of no consequence what form we give to this anthropomorphism; whether with the "Timæus" of Plato we postulate as an emanation of Deity in living beings moving ideas, with which never any definite conception has been connected in anybody's mind; whether with other philosophers we suppose an unconscious soul which constructs bodies after the types of their various kinds ever present to itself, which sees through all the enigmas of physics and chemistry, and which is thus far more intelligent than the conscious soul; or, finally, whether with Leibnitz we suppose God to have once for all in the beginning ordered the universe with a view to ends. It is, I repeat, of no consequence under which of these forms one attempts the impossible. So soon as one quits the region of mechanical necessity, he enters the boundless cloud-land of speculation. But it is all to no purpose; for, if the teleological character of nature weaves a crown of thorns for monism, at the same time her occasional antiteleology is anything but a bed of roses for dualism. The appeal to the advantages presented by dualism for the explication of ethical problems is of no avail with one who knows the true state of the case. Must we over again be reminded of the obscurity which Leibnitz vainly labored to remove in his "Theodicy"?

The student of nature in the present day can only assume the attitude of resignation toward the ultimate principles of things. I have in another place shown how the palpable errors of such thinkers as Leibnitz can be explained by the times in which they live. Between Leibnitz and ourselves there is an enormous chasm dug by scientific research, reënforced by observation and experiment, by calculation and induction.

Above all, qualitative research, so called, has on the scientific mind an educating influence, like that of life on character. Being corrected at every step by nature, and constantly reminded of the uncertainty of his judgments and the fallaciousness of his apparently most firm