Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/125

 in the one case we attain unconditioned, in the other conditioned, truths. Our knowledge of nature is constantly being extended by connecting facts which are increasingly coherent in their nature, and co-ordinating relations which tend to become more and more complex, and the proof and criterion of the truth of the simpler relations are to be found in the system which harmonises them in itself. The falsity of a theory can only be demonstrated by proving it to be inexplicable; that is to say, by showing that it cannot be connected with other groups of relations. The uniformity and unity of nature become more and more evident the more closely we enquire into it, but, on the other hand, we cannot investigate it without believing it to be already uniform and one, and without implicitly admitting that nature constitutes in itself a unique system of relations which condition each other ad infinitum, presuppose and imply one another ab aeterno, of which individual objects are but the ultimate consequences and combinations, that is to say, without presupposing that nature has a significance present in its totality to Absolute Thought. Our consciousness, being subject to the limitations of time, cannot fully grasp this significance or identify itself entirely with the Divine Mind, but all human knowledge presupposes this significance, of which our knowledge is the gradual revelation in time. In the interpretation of the great book of nature, in which the Thought of God is revealed to the soul of man, the same thing occurs which each one of us may observe when reading a sentence or phrase; single words succeed one another by means of a process developing in time, but the thought that the whole sentence or phrase must have a meaning is present with us from the moment we begin to read, and, when we have reached the end, this meaning is present to our consciousness as a simultaneous whole, not as a series of successive elements. Thus, although the psycho-physiological organism may develop empirically in time, our thought in the act of grasping universal