Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/656

638 tends constantly to produce one-sidedness. Nature strives ever to rectify this tendency by presenting to us an unsorted variety of details, and succeeds in keeping most of us within the bounds of sanity, though not of perfect balance. "The complexity of our environment," says Ribot, "is our safeguard against automatism." But our ideas are ingrowing, and need to be constantly watched and corrected. Insanity is a matter of degree. When the "fixed ideas" which few of us are without pass a certain point and get too obtrusive, we become monomaniacs. Men of one idea, men of mental bias, narrow-minded men, present milder cases of the same disease.

Fruitful illustrations of this law may be seen in the systems of thought that have prevailed since the days of Pythagoras. Systems of words would be a better name for many of them. As in our seeing, so in our thinking, we are limited by the apparatus that happens to be at our command. For most of us, at least, the available apparatus for constructing a philosophical system is a philosophical vocabulary. From this fact and the further one that these vocabularies are largely inherited from the schools, it results that the apperceptive organs of metaphysicians are wofully inadequate to the task they undertake, namely, the cognition of ultimate realities. It is no wonder, therefore, that these realities have been persistently apperceived under so many different forms in the various metaphysical systems, supported by so many "hide-bound adult philosophers."' Many a well-meaning philosopher has got caught in the swing of a certain terminology, till his thoughts have become slaves to the movements of his tongue. We are reminded of Aristotle's, categories, Kant's map of the mind, Comte's three stages, Hegel's thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the absolute and the finite, subject and object, mind and matter, body and spirit, noumenon and phenomenon, real and ideal, rational and empirical. This is the "tyranny of formulas" from whose iron rule science is now escaping, but which is still the terror of philosophy and religion.

The danger of words and formulas may be well illustrated further by the mischief made in philosophy by the presence of negative terms. These are the words which in the finished systems of the philosophers mark, we may say, the absence of thought. We recall the "Infinite" of Zeno and Kant, the "Absolute" of Fichte and Hegel, the "Supra-essential" of Pseudo-Dionysius, the "Unconditioned" of Hamilton, the "Unknowable" of Spencer, the "Not-ourselves" of Matthew Arnold, the "Unconscious" of von Hartmann, the "Immortality" of Christian believers, the of the Greeks, and the "Non-being" of the Hegelians. These represent the unfathomable places in thought, which we bridge with a negative term and pass on blithely as before, but