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النشر الإلكتروني

ART. IV. THE PROVINCE OF PHILOSOPHY.

The earth was made

THE central figure of the earth is man. for him. It would be chaos without him. He has over it, therefore, the right of conquest. He is superior to it and dominates it. The physical forces have their highest uses and finest illustrations in his service. The spiritual forces, also, by reason of his high investment, claim kinship with him, and they are his companions; they constitute the springs of his immortal correspondences. That man should be a creature of extreme limitations in his beginnings is of no serious moment when he has for his future an open highway.

That which distinguishes this being, and gives him his place, is the fact that he is a knowledge-gatherer. This fact has very much to do with his real life. He feeds on the truth and grows. It is the essence of his eternal being. All his senses therefore his perceptive faculties, his reasoning powers, his intuitions—are the instruments of the mightiness involved in his powers.

What are man's methods in the search after truth? Let us formulate a brief answer to this question. And in the beginning we postulate the realism of the external physical world and also the realism of the spiritual world. Waiving some of the finer distinctions that are made by a school of the world's scholarship-chief in which is, perhaps, Mr. Drummond—the mass of mankind is not likely soon to give over the thought that there is an outside universe and an inside universe-one of matter with its code in harmony, the other of mind and spirit. To overcome a physical force is not the end of being; to ignore that force is not the end of being. Man has always builded highest in those times when he has given obedience to both sides of his being, the physical and the spiritual. The line between these two may not always be drawn. The fineness of the relationship may elude the grasp of thought at times; yet the world's faith in the duality of matter and spirit remains unshaken.

The primal and first source of all knowledge is the universe of substance and energy. The mediating sources for man are the means by which he arrives at this knowledge. These

sources are in him. They are the tentacles, they are the grappling-hooks, of his spirit in the apprehension of truth.

There is a way by which we touch nature and know it. We open our eyes and see; then we shut our eyes and think. We taste, we touch, we smell, we hear; we digest, we subsidize; we build on our attainments, and now and then we see that we have put things together by some unconscious mental process. It is so that truths of a fundamental kind are frequently made to appear through rational and inductive steps. But all truth is not at the end of the inductive process. There are realities as deep as the consciousness of being, and from the same source with it. They are essential to the life of an intelligent beingessential to its conception of a divine being. They are not evident they are self-evident; they are axiomatic; they are a priori, if you please, and may have in them data sufficient to base in sound philosophy that loudest laugh of materialistic irony, "an a priori theory of the universe." That there can be but one method in the pursuit of truth is a pure assumption. The truth-seeker who has not gone beyond the immediate inductive processes is yet in his swaddling-bands. Induction is necessary; it is essential. Its integrity as a method is to be proclaimed with waving of banners, but it never completes the round of truth. In the pursuit of knowledge there must be a starting-place with ultimate truths. The common standingground is on the substratum of basal beliefs. Man starts on his journey with some original equipments of truth-that is, they are one with his being; and in this maze of fact and fancy through which he must go they keep him from ending in confusion. They are the common magnets of spiritual force which have given human history the same features in all times, and which decide all human movements toward a final federation.

The physicist and the chemist build safely on the postulate that in matter there is an ultimate and as yet undiscovered point of force. The astronomer postulates the realism of the force of gravity-a force the real nature of which he does not at all understand. The mathematician builds his whole system on a few self-evident propositions. If these are not a priori, what are they? And are they not based in sound philosophy? The grounds of human belief are not to be estimated from their sources, but from their solidity. It is not true that we learn

every thing we know. Some things we must know before we can learn any thing. Some things we know before we know we know them. We act on them before they come to consciousness. It is doubtless true that experience is the mediating source for the acquisition of the greater number of facts and principles with which we are acquainted; but it is also true that as to the significance and fundamental weight of the truths, experience and observation must give place to the higher cognitions of the soul, whose first springs lie deeper than the consciousness. Count Tolstoï, the Russian nobleman and novelist, speaking of the change which came over his belief, says: "I was compelled to admit besides the reasoning knowledge, which I once thought the only knowledge, there was in every man another kind of knowledge." By the reasoning knowledge here he means such knowledge as arises from contact with the world through the senses-by test, by experiment, and by any of the methods that make it true that men grow wiser as they grow older. By the other kind he does not mean the unreasoning any more than he would say that the instincts and intuitions of a child are unreasonable; for these things in the child may be the expressions of the highest reason. He means to say that some things are known from the first impress; some things are reasonable in a self-evident way, and the soul has no power to disbelieve them. Human beings may in words deny them, and the next moment they are compelled to act on them. The philosophical basis of these first truths is as reliable and secure as any truth of the reflective reason.

Belief in originals is the imperative of consciousness. There are beliefs and feelings which sway the heart of man which are not conveyed to him by study or research; so it follows that the base of the mental building is shaken and unsteady whenever reliable knowledge is restricted to the channels of the senses. To overthrow the inward life of the soul in its voicings of truth and in its inward spiritual yearnings is to stand in the presence of facts for which no account can be given; and they are the facts which must be taken into the estimate by any philosophy that gets anywhere. Aristotle claimed that there was a "first philosophy"-a body of principles common to all inquiry, serving equally as the base of investigation in any field. That which takes in the mind the nature of a con

clusion has a somewhat back of it. These originals of truth which have their posit in the soul have nothing back of them for us as standing-ground for argument. By no sort of reasoning or analogy do we appear to strengthen our faith in them. They are from first sources, so far as we know, and they press us with the feeling that if they are not true then there is nothing true.

More or less hinderance to clear thinking in these times, and, therefore, to the advance of the truth, arises out of the uses which are made out of two leading terms in our language.

The first is the term science. It is used to mean a part or the whole according to the pleasure of the user; and occasionally it is used to make a part stand for the whole, and it becomes thereby the instrument of an intellectual monopoly. It is frequently said that "science, as such, knows nothing of such and such questions; that such and such questions are not within the sphere of science; that science has nothing to do with them." If by these statements it is meant to give expression to the fact that by certain special methods some facts cannot be discovered and some great questions cannot be considered, the statements are without objection. If the microscopist comes to the edge of a chasin and says that he cannot discover the bottom of that chasm with his microscope, all hands agree; but if he says there is no other way to find the bottom of things except through the microscope, all hands dissent. If he denies the reliability of a pluminet-line or a lantern, we accuse him of narrowness. Some special method takes to itself the popular name "scientific," and then assumes to cover the whole field of reliable method in the pursuit of truth, and it begs the question to carry the day. Derivatively the word science covers the whole field of knowledge. Whatever may be known assuredly of any reality is scientific knowledge, and the method of this knowledge, whatever its special features, is philosophic. The philosophic method is not one method, but any method by which truth may be apprehended by the human mind.

Those devoted to special research are likely to think well of their specialty, which is meet and good unless they fall into the fatal sin of claiming for it aristocracy over all others-unless they take it up and in the face of the intelligent universe say, "This is. the old blue hen's chicken."

There is, indeed, great attraction now about some of the special methods of science. There is now among scholars a commendable pride in receiving nothing except on reliable evidence. There are many new and true and sure principles breaking in on us from the physical realm. The investigator has with each step assurance that he is in the presence of reliable and actual forces. So certain are his movements that he is made honest by the very integrity of his method. Пle comes to be very sincere. He is entranced; he loses his relish for any other method, and he is discovered with an unwitting yet craven appetite to have things done in a particular way.

To accept no fact or principle except that which can bring with it reliable evidence is well in a world so full of vagaries. To question the very ground of things is in harmony with the spirit of the times, and is productive of great good. It is doing away with much surface opinion and sentiment, and much belief which deserves no better name than superstition. It is producing a restatement of many of the evidences of religious faith. It is spoiling the old interpretation of many a text. It has brought into the popular mind a revulsion against ever receiving things ex cathedra. It has made of no force that oldfashioned credence to reliability which consisted in the fact that it was regular. There is a hopeful and prophetic spirit in these times which proposes for itself the work of making its own way, painfully, laboriously, into the world of minutest facts. It equips itself with pick-ax and test-tube and retort, and the thousand-featured apparatus of modern science, and goes about putting dogged questions to all phenomena. This spirit is indeed of royal temper and mold, but it is a fatal error for it to be led into the delusion that there is nothing reliable in all this universe except that which is disclosed in this or in some kindred way to the senses. There is such a thing as scientific color-blindness.

There is a form of research which has to do with the facts and forces of nature. It detects and tabulates phenomena, and in this work it only plows the surface of things. The student here may fairly say to himself, "I will not ask for the bottom facts in the case. I will deal simply with phenomena, and their first physical certainties. I will not put to my work of test and experiment any fundamental inquiry which cannot be an

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