Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/349

Rh things and processes named; and nearly all incorrect thinking is due to imperfect representation or to non-representation. This is so with thoughts about concrete things, and still more with thoughts about abstract things. If, to an inadequately instructed person, I show a hyperbola and a parabola, and tell him that the sides of the last will obviously meet sooner than the sides of the first, he will not improbably believe my erroneous statement; and, if he does so, it will be because he fails to figure in thought the characters of the two curves. Did he mentally represent them distinctly, he would see that the sides of neither can ever meet. Or if, to such a person I say that, linear dimensions being the same, an eight-sided cube contains more matter than a six-sided cube, he may vaguely think that I am right. If he accepts my false statement, why does he do so? Simply because he has not formed true mental images of the things named. Did he imagine them, or try to imagine them, he would discover that there exists no such thing as an eight-sided cube. Turning to statements about physical phenomena, we have a vivid illustration of sham thinking in the assertion, not unfrequently made concerning some remarkable phenomenon—"Oh, it is caused by electricity:" an assertion which, in both speaker and hearers, leaves a contented feeling that they understand the matter: the truth being that none of them have the remotest idea what electricity is, and none of them have the remotest idea how electricity, did they know its nature, could produce the effect observed. What they take to be their ideas are simply pseud-ideas. And if in the field of sensible experience there is a prevalence of these pseud-ideas, still more widely do they prevail in the fields of theology and metaphysics. Examples are not far to seek.

In Mr. Balfour's proposition that out of the "depths of unfathomable mystery" there "emerge the certitudes of religion," there are two essential elements—that which emerges, and the process of emergence. The primary religious certitude, as implied by his argument, is the existence of "a rational Author" for "the ordered system of phenomena"—an existence which he thinks more certain than the existence of an "independent material world" (p. 237). If, now, the thought of "a rational Author" has emerged out of the "depths of unfathomable mystery," it must, if it is distinguishable from the mere blank form of a thought, have some definable characters; and unless Mr. Balfour considers himself, and men who have similar thoughts, to be fundamentally different from men in general, we must say that thoughts having like characters have emerged into human consciousness at large. I will not ask what happens if we contemplate all the implications, and observe the multitudinous conceptions of gods which the multitudinous races of men have