Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/165

Rh taken the trouble to acquaint himself with this doctrine, he would have learned that the intuitions of axiomatic truths are regarded by me as latent in the inherited brain, just as bodily reflex actions are latent in the inherited nervous centres of a lower order; that such latent intuitions are made potentially more distinct by the greater definiteness of structure due to individual action and culture; and that thus, axiomatic truths, having a warrant entirely a posteriori for the race, have for the individual a warrant which, substantially a priori is made complete a posteriori. And he would then have learned that, as, during evolution, Thought has been moulded into increasing correspondence with Things, and as such correspondence, tolerably complete in respect of the simple, ever-present, and invariable relations, as those of space, has made considerable advance in respect of the primary dynamical relations, the assertion that the resulting intuitions are authoritative is the assertion that the simplest uniformities of Nature, as experienced throughout an immeasurable past, are better known than they are as experienced during an individual life. All which conceptions, however, being, as it seems, unheard of by the reviewer, he regards my trust in these primordial intuitions as like that of the Ptolemists in their fancies about perfection!

Thus far my chief antagonists, passive, if not active, have been Prof. Tait and, by implication. Sir William Thomson, his coadjutor in the work quoted against me—men of standing, and the last of them of world-wide reputation as a mathematician and physicist. Partly because the opinions of such men demand attention, I have dealt with the questions raised at some length; and partly, also, because the origin and consequent warrant of physical axioms are questions of general and permanent interest. The reviewer, who, by citing against me these authorities, has gained for some of his criticisms consideration they would otherwise not deserve, I must, in respect of his other criticisms, deal with very briefly. Because, for reasons sufficiently indicated, I did not assail sundry of his statements, he has reiterated them as unassailable. I will here add no more than is needful to show how groundless is his assumption.

What the reviewer says on the metaphysical aspects of the propositions we distinguish as physical, need not detain us long. His account of my exposition of "Ultimate Scientific Ideas," he closes by saying of me that "he is not content with less than showing that all our fundamental conceptions are inconceivable." Whether the reviewer knows what he means by an inconceivable conception, I cannot tell. It will suffice to say that I have attempted no such remarkable feat as that described. My attempt has been to show that objective activities, together with their objective forms, are inconceivable by us—that such symbolic conceptions of them as we frame, and are obliged to use, are proved, by the alternative contradictions which a