Collected Works (Vol. III)

228 EPILOGUE AND DEDICATION for the others. God forbid that I should rest this paper on a historical basis! I am talking about the certain results of human psychology: and science can neither help nor hinder me. True, when Huxley and Tyndall were alive, their miserable intelligences were always feeding us up with the idea that science might one day be able to answer some of the simpler questions which one can put: but that was because of their mystical leanings; they are dead, and have left no successors, To-day we have the certitude, ‘Science never can tell,” of the laborious Ray Lankester ‘‘ Whose zeal for knowledge mocks the curfew's. call, And after midnight, to make Lodge look silly, Studies anatomy—in Piccadilly.” Really, we almost echo his despair. When, only too many years ago, I was learning chemistry, the text-books were content with some three pages on Camphor: to-day, a mere abstract of what is known occupies 400 closely printed pages: but Knowledge is in no wise advanced. It is no doubt more difficult to learn ‘‘ Paradise Lost’”’ by heart than ‘‘ We are Seven” ; but when you have done it, you are no better at figure-skating. I am not denying that the vast storehouses of fact do help us to a certain distillation (as it were) of their grain: but I may be allowed to complain with Maudsley that there is nobody competent to do it. Even when a genius does come along, his results will likely be as empirical as the facts they cover. Evolution is no better than creation to explain things, as Spencer showed. The truth of the matter appears to be that as reason is incompetent to solve the problems of philosophy and religion, @ fortiori science is incompetent. All that science can do is to present reason with new facts. To such good purpose has it done this, that no modern scientist can hope to do more than knowa little about one bud on his pet twig of the particular branch he has chosen: to study, as it hangs. temptingly from one bough of the Tree of Knowledge. One of the most brilliant of the younger school of chemists remarks. in the course of 4 stirring discourse upon malt analysis: ‘‘ Of extremely complex organic bodies the con- stitution of some 250,000 is known with certainty, and the number grows daily. No one chemist pretends to an intimate ac- quaintance with more than a few of these . .. Why not leave it alone, and try to be God? But even had we Maudsley’s committee of geniuses; should we be in any real sense the better? Not while the reason is, as at present, the best guide known to men, not until humanity has developed a mental power of an entirely different kind. For to the philosopher it soon becomes apparent that. reason is a weapon inadequate to the task, Hume saw it, and became a sceptic in the widest sense of the term. Mansel saw it, and counsels us to try Faith, as if it was not the very fact that Faith was futile that bade us appeal to reason. Huxley saw it, and, no remedy presenting itself but a vague faith in the possibilities of human evolution, called himself an agnostic: Kant saw it for a moment, but it soon hid itself behind his terminology; Spencer saw it, and tried to gloss it over by smooth talk, and to bury it beneath the ponderous tomes of his unwieldy erudition. I see it, too, and the way out to Life. But the labyrinth, if you please, before the clue: the Minotaur before the maiden ! Thank you, madam; would you care to look at our new line in Minotaurs at 2s. 3d. ? This way, please. I have taken a good deal of trouble lately to prove the proposition ‘‘All arguments are arguments in a circle.’ Without wearying my readers with the formal proof, which I hope to advance one day in an essay on the syllogism, I will take (as sketchily as you please !) the obvious and important case of the consciousness. A. The consciousness is made up ex-