Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/512

492 and so ought to be encyclical, encyclopedic. It must no more neglect the positive sciences than the moral. "A wider metaphysic would not harm our physic" is an abundantly true warning. Equally true is it that a wider physic would not harm our metaphysic. It fills me with amazement to see the arguments still resorted to by men, learned in a fashion, and full of good-will, but quite unacquainted with the true bearings of the problems which agitate the modern mind, nay, totally devoid of the intellectual training necessary in order so much as to appreciate them. Their blindness to the signs of the times is well-nigh miraculous. They do not seem to possess even the sensitive membrane which Darwin tells us is the beginning of the eye. Who, that is at all competent to judge, can deny that the progress of the sciences during the present century has largely revolutionized the world of thought, or doubt that many old questions assume quite a new aspect in the light now shed upon them? To take one instance only, spiritualism is by no means bound up with the old dualistic conceptions which posit matter and mind as two incomprehensibly related substances, eternally alien from each other, and irreconcilably hostile. For myself, every day that I live I become more confirmed in the belief, which I expressed some years ago in this "Review," that "the old wall of partition between spirit and matter is cracking in all directions," that "we shall come to recognize a thinking substance, of which thought is the foundation, not the resultant." Even now—in words which I gladly borrow from Mr.Romanes—may we not regard "any sequence of natural causation as the merely phenomenal aspect of the ontological reality, the outward manifestation of an inward meaning"? The reality is spiritual, the phenomenon merely the shadow and the symbol. Materialism, like all errors, is but the distortion of a truth. It is a false expression of that tendency to unity which is so marked a characteristic of the modern mind, and which is not false. A century ago Lessing pronounced ѐѵ каì πӑѵ to be the last word of philosophy. Whatever exception may be taken to the formula, assuredly, it adumbrates a great verity. And as assuredly none can be further removed from the apprehension of that verity than those who, like Diderot, discern in the universe nothing but "one and the same phenomenon indefinitely diversified." Enveloped as we are, according to the profound doctrine of the old Vedic sages, in the veil of Mâya, what grosser illusion can there be than to mistake the fleeting shows apprehensible by our senses for the Self-Existent? "Of him, and through him, and to hira are all things." Most near and most hidden all phenomena consist by him, all phenomena point to hira, his indwelling leads us to his transcendence. "Wer darf ihn nennen?"—Who dare name him?—the poet asks.