evolution descending out of an inconceivably distant past and rolling forward into an endless future. Thus the scientist sees a different world from that which the plain man sees. He is inclined to be very proud of his world. Perhaps he looks back with some degree of disparagement and pity upon the plain man's world, if not upon the plain man himself, although as a class scientists are not given to such thoughts. He sees that the plain man's world is true and good from the plain man's point of view, but that it is a superficial and poor world compared with the depth and grandeur of the world his eyes see. Now the scientist's world, like the plain man's world, is true and good as far as it goes. He has looked through appearances into their proximate causes, and thus has reversed some appearances and put a different aspect on all of them. He has found a system of universal causation and thus laid bare the mechanism and order and harmony of the world. His investigations and discoveries have also been of enormous practical use as he has caught and conquered the forces of nature and made them the nimble servants of man. More than any other man the scientist has multiplied our comforts and luxuries and created our vast, splendid, modern civilization. Nevertheless, the scientist is in danger of falling into the same error as the plain man, that of thinking he sees to the bottom of the world. He hears vague rumors of a metaphysical world beyond, and may be somewhat suspicious of it. Many of the things he hears about this world may be to him idle tales or absurd conceits. In fact, some scientists appear never to have so much as heard of the questions the metaphysician asks and of the world he explores, and their unsophisticated innocence of these things may amuse the metaphysician as much as some of the notions of the plain man amuse the scientist. The scientist's world, like the plain man's world, is not false-unless he insists on its being the whole and the final world. 3. THE METAPHYSICIAN'S WORLD The Let us now enter with the metaphysician into his world. He also believes in the plain man's world and in the scientist's world. He believes in them for what they are, and uses and enjoys them as much as anybody. He, too, is a man of flesh and blood, and keeps his feet on the ground. But he also knows how to leave these worlds behind and go on towards perfection. metaphysician appreciates the plain man's appearances and the scientist's causes, but he is not satisfied to stop with these. The distinguishing mark of the metaphysician is this: he goes behind proximate causes and seeks one ultimate cause. He sees that the scientist with his proximate causes is still in the land of phenomena, of appearances, though his appearances are somewhat deeper than those of the plain man. The metaphysician seeks to get behind all appearances to reality itself. What, then, does the metaphysician see as he looks out over that landscape? We are now concerned only with giving a descriptive hint of the nature of the metaphysician's world, and not at all with the processes and proofs by which he reaches and justifies it. As he looks out over that landscape, the metaphysician begins a process of dismantling it and packing its apparent contents away in his own mind. The first thing he does is to sweep all light and color off the landscape and absorb them into his own sensations. He believes that light is a subjective sensation excited in his mind by some objective cause in the landscape bearing no resemblance to the subjective experience. There is therefore no light or brightness out there on the landscape, but it is all dark as absolute night. Light being thus swept off the landscape, all color goes with it, and there is no green on the grass or blue in the sky. In the same way, the sensations of sound, taste, smell, and touch are believed by the metaphysician to be subjective, and there is nothing like them in the landscape. There is no song of birds in the air, or sweetness in the apple, no pungent odor in the crushed pine leaves, and no hardness in the stone. These are subjective states in the mind, though they have objective causes. The metaphysician thus stands fronting an external world that in itself is dark, silent, tasteless, and odorless, though it has the power of exciting a wonderful world of sensation in the mind. So far all metaphysicians agree. At this point metaphysicians divide into two great companies, the dualists and the monists. The dualists stop this process of dismantling and ab sorbing the world at the points of space and time, leaving the world existing as a mass of extended reality moving through temporal changes, with which the mind holds relations. The monists go on with the process of unifying the world, but carry it out to different results according as their monism is materialistic, idealistic, or agnostic. The materialistic monist views matter extended in space and moving in time as the ultimate reality, and mind as a manifestation of it, a kind of halo or efflorescence playing around or within it that was exhaled out of it and will be reabsorbed; and thus he packs mind back into matter. The idealistic monist carries the process of dismantling the world to its logical end in the opposite direction. He breaks down the very framework of space and time in which the world is contained and withdraws it into the mind. He conceives that space and time are intuitions of the mind and are no more qualities of things than are color and sound, but are modes of our experience excited by the objective reality. This objective reality he conceives to be mind or spirit, and usually the idealist conceives it to be one Absolute Spirit, or God, who affects us in the modes we call sensation and intuition. The idealistic metaphysician thus regards that landscape and the whole world as the reaction of our mind on God's mind. Sensation, space, and time are subjective in our mind, but they have their exciting cause and objective reality in God's mind. The agnostic monist views matter as one and mind as another manifestation of the same unknown reality; and he may, or he may not, regard space and time as subjective in the mind. By this time the plain man finds himself in a strange world, and all things begin to swim before his eyes and to melt into a mist of nothingness. The dualist is radical and destructive enough in sweeping all light, colors, sounds, tastes, and odors off the world, but the idealistic monist, seems to lose his reason and go mad when he utterly wrecks and dissolves the world, even to its framework of space and time, and packs it away in the mind. Is not this the insanity of speculation? Who can conceive, much less believe in, and still less live in, a world of pure spirit where there is only a swarm of finite minds and one Infinite Mind? Are we really ghosts? Such a seemingly spectral world frightens the plain man, and even the scientist may flee from it in terror, or else - he may laugh at it. Thus the metaphysician appears to have fulfilled before its time the poet's prophecy : And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, Both the plain man and the scientist may turn upon the metaphysician with the charge: |