Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/665

Rh. In man we find the phenomena of animal life on a larger and more differentiated scale, but the fact of self grows faint as our study is continued. What is this vital force, and what have we to do with it and is it, after all, more than another name for the movement of molecules? And of what are our cells composed? Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, we know by name, but what are these in essence, and how are they different one from another? Does matter really exist? Mathematicians have claimed that all relations of ponderable matter and force might exist if the atoms of matter were not realities, but simply relations. Each of these atoms possessed of attraction or weight may be a vortex ring or eddy in the ether, the ultimate units of which have vibration but not attraction. If, therefore, the body of man be an alliance of millions of animal cells, each cell formed of millions of eddies in an inconceivable and impossible ether; if all things around us are recognized only by their effect on the most unstable part of this unstable structure, then again "let us think small beer of ourselves and pass around the bottle."

Each fact or law must be expressed in terms of human experience, if it is expressed or made intelligible at all. To such terms, the word reality applies, and beyond such reality we have never gone. Apparently beyond it we can not go, at least in the only life we have ever known. Balfour's plea for "philosophic doubt" of the reality of the subject-matter of science is simply a rhetorical trick of describing the known in terms of the unknown. By the same process we may call a fishwife an "abracadabra" or an "icosahedron," and by the same process we can build out of the commonest materials "an occult science" or a new theosophy. The measure of a man is the basis of human knowledge, and whatever can not be brought to this measure is no part of knowledge. In converse fashion Balfour speaks of the unknown in terms of the known; of the infinite in terms of human experience. This gives to his positive foundations of belief an appearance of reality as fallacious as the unreality he assigns to the foundations of science. This appearance of reality is the base cf Haeckel's sneer at conventional religion as belief in a "gaseous vertebrate."

It is perfectly easy for science to distinguish between subjective and objective nerve conditions. It can separate those produced by subjective nervous derangements, or by conditions already passed, from those which are contemporary impressions of external things. It is perfectly easy for common sense to do the same. To be able to do so is the essence of sanity. The test of sanity is its livableness, for insanity is death. The borderland of spirit of which we hear so often of late, the land in which subjective and objective creations jostle each other, is the borderland of