Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/265

Rh thinking), the mechanism of which they in no wise understand, to an agent (the soul), the mere existence of which they fail to substantiate.

If it be urged on behalf of any class of metaphysical school-men, who may refuse to accept Kant's modest avowal of failure, that they really have succeeded (because to their own contentment) in fathoming the problems of the genesis of mind and the nature of the soul, and that they are not answerable for the defective intelligence of the outside world, which fails to follow them, the physiologist need not hesitate to concede that they soar in a region of visionary transcendentalism, for which his mental bias and material modes of thought have not fitted him either as a worker or a critic. He is as ill adapted for reveling in trains of speculative abstraction, whereof the issue, purely subjective, can never reach the reality of objective demonstrativeness, as the metaphysician for peering through lenses many a weary day and night to verify a single fact, the present obvious value of which may be nil, but of which the future story may be written as the starting link of chains of important truths. Between the metaphysical contemplative mind and the scientific observant mind the antagonism is so profound that the union of the two qualities in the same individual, even in very different degrees of potentiality, is the rarest of intellectual endowments.

The physiologist of the pure observation school may, then, admit his deficiency in critical training for the just estimation of metaphysical methods, and this all the more resignedly in that (as we shall by-and-by fully see) metaphysicians are found occasionally confessing, nay boasting, that they fail to understand each other, while they are likewise accused, apparently on justifiable grounds, of not at all times and seasons thoroughly comprehending each man his own individual work. So the physiologist need not trouble himself about methods but ask for results. And this he has ventured to do, conceiving himself entitled by the worth of the latter to gauge the efficiency of the former. While, then, acknowledging in a spirit of homage savoring of of awe the abstract grandeur of the metaphysical intellect and the aims of its activity, he has earnestly but not irreverently inquired. Do you metaphysicians not deceive yourselves? Are you quite sure you do not take words for ideas? Have you or have you not perpetually confounded figments of the brain with realities? To what increments of true knowledge—the real, substantial knowledge of things—can you lay claim? Have you of late done much more than clothe old thoughts in new phraseology—phraseology of greater precision than that it has supplanted, we may fairly concede? Have you not in sober truth been engaged since the dawn of philosophy—multum agendi, pauxillum agentes (doing much, accomplishing little)—in a still beginning, never ending, logomachia? Can you point among your fellows to that emphatic unanimity of creed on fundamental questions which shall demand, as its right, acceptance from the