Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/276

272  To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

The outward gentleman who is an inward voluptuary, confides to you upon occasion that he is a "man of the world," and with the slightest encouragement he will let you know what "the world" is viewed from his standpoint.

The subjective idealist speaks without a qualification or misgiving about "my world," "your world," "his world "—how we, he and you and I create these several worlds.

"Nature is in reality a tapestry of which we see the reverse side. This is why we try to turn it," says a distinguished French literary critic.

A fact about these various worlds which comes out in bold relief when we place them alongside one another is the way they contradict, in some instances quite annihilate, one another. Perhaps the crowning instance of mutually annihilative "worlds" is the "all is flux" world of the Hereclitian philosophy, and the "no new thing under the sun" world of Ecclesiastes. And if any one is disposed to think this Greek-Hebrew world muddle is too ancient and outworn to be significant for us moderns, let him recall, on the one hand, the energeticers, to use a term that has gained some currency for designating a number of men high-stationed in the science of the present moment; and, on the other hand, those speculators who largely stake their scientific faith on a motionless ether.

The world surely does "speak a various language" to different persons. This can not be doubted. And there is much to justify the assertion of a German writer on esthetics that "Die Natur ist jedem ein anderes" (Nature is something different to every person). "Dem Kinde [ist es] kindlich, dem Gotte göttlich" (To the child it is childish, to the God, divine).

But is it really true that nature—the world—is through and through different to each person? Does each one create and possess his own world, and that in such fashion that these worlds have not in deepest essence, identical elements of uncompromising objectivity? Were I to attempt to answer this question to-night in terms that would fit well into the scheme of office furniture, so to speak, of either the professional scientist or the professional philosopher, I should soon empty this room, at any rate, if the company were to be more truthful than courteous in expressing its feelings as to the properties of such an occasion as this.

So what I say toward an answer to the query shall not be in the role of either scientist or philosopher, but rather that of the humble