nothing but the somatic unity and changing in all degrees as this physical unity changes. Facts will be heard and their bearing will be acknowledged. Hypnotism, but recently deemed worthy the attention of scientific men, has already a bibliography so extensive as to be startling in its significance, and, by its attested facts, is compelling a reconstruction of our conception of personality, together with our entire psychical doctrine.

As the conclusion of this paper, permit me to urge that those who concern themselves with questions of morals and religion should not reject the method of treatment demanded by physical science. Let not the statement be accepted that science is one thing, has one method, while philosophy is another thing and has another method.

This is the fashionable proclamation of many conservatives. Where science stops, they tell us, philosophy begins. Philosophy reads off the data of science in the light of its higher intuitions. Meanwhile, on all hands, the cry is sounded, "Give us grounds for belief," such grounds, in kind, as the chemist gives his pupils, the historian his. We would have a reasoning similar in kind to that of the scientists, and would apply it to matters that much concern us, to sin, suffering, death, immortality, God, Christ, Judgment.

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I hail as the dawn, what so many regard as the night, this necessity now upon us of treating these subjects according to the requirements of sound inductive inference.

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI.

W. R. Benedict.

THE POLARITY OF TRUTH.

THERE is a certain fascination for the human mind in the resemblances which can be traced between things material and things spiritual. Perhaps it is because human nature is the province where these two worlds lap on to each and lock into each other in close and vital conjunction. It may be simply the instinctive allegiance of humanity to its own constitution. Whatever the reason, the fact is sufficiently certified. Mankind in general has a native fondness for everything in the nature of parallel between the material and the spiritual. It is this fact which accounts for what Tennyson has called "Our matter-moulded forms of speech." In

this fact chiefly lurks the true poet's power to charm and to stir the world. This fact goes far to explain the success of teachers who are skillful in handling the parable and the allegory. The great Teacher of all, by speaking his gospel in parables, not only showed himself familiar with the world of nature; far more did. He show his perfect familiarity with human nature. Westminster theology in its confessional forms seems certain, in this day, to be either revised or disused. But Westminster theology, wrought up into finest allegory by the master hand of John Bunyan, the Bedford brazier, how senseless for any one to think of revising. Not till the scores of languages into which it has been translated shall all be forgotten will "Pilgrim's Progress" go out of date. Butler's "Analogy" continued to be a power in the world of religious thought so long after its work of demolishing English deism was accomplished, not only from having truth for its cause, but as well from having analogy for its armor. Drummond's “Natural Law in the Spiritual World" has made an impression in our time, far exceeding anything that it really contributes either to philosophy or theology, by reason of the original, the skillful, the engaging way in which it follows out certain novel and striking parallels between the material and the spiritual. The Bible itself vindicates its right to be called the revelation of God for all time, not only because what it reveals is the everlasting truth of God, but also because its methods of revelation comprise a very universe of symbolism. That there is exceeding danger in this way of handling spiritual truth will of course be admitted, for that admission is the best of testimony to the exceeding value of it. "The principles of nature and its laws are types and shadows of the Invisible," wrote Frederick Robertson. It is a single feature of the invisible, the world of spiritual truth that we now make note of and attempt to study by the help of its shadow in the material world.

There is a certain phenomenon observable in the world of material substances and forces which has come to be known to science by the name of polarity. It is a phenomenon not easy to define in terms altogether clear, let alone any attempt to explain it. In the Dictionary it is put down as "That quality or condition of a body in virtue of which it exhibits opposite or contrasted properties or powers, in opposite or contrasted parts or directions." The late President Barnard describes it somewhat more technically, if not any more intelligibly, as " A physical character possessed in "A certain conditions by some bodies or their molecules, in virtue of

which they manifest in a determinate direction properties that are analogous, and at the same time contrasted on opposite sides."

The most familiar instance of polarity is no doubt in the common magnet, whose opposite ends are called its poles. While it is one piece of metal throughout, having the same substance, the same density, and so far as can be observed the same structure, the two ends of it show a singular unlikeness and opposition to each other. What one attracts the other repels. Each repels its like and attracts its unlike. The result of their unlikeness and opposition is that they reënforce instead of counteracting each other. And right here is the characteristic, the significant fact about this physical property called polarity. It is the existence in the same body of a distinct unlikeness, a certain contrariety to itself, which, however, does not interfere at all with its unity of substance, which augments rather than weakens its actual energy. And even in cases where there is no manifestation of active energy, the fact of polarity is still observable. It appears sometimes simply in an unlikeness of properties in the same substance under slightly different circumstances. "The most important examples of this," to quote President Barnard again, “are the polarity possessed under certain circumstances by the rays of light and heat." Polarity as a phenomenon of light has special pertinence to the present study, from the fact that light is the common, the well nigh universal symbol for truth. The Duke of Argyle, in his address upon "What is Truth," speaks of "That homology which all languages recognize between light and knowledge," and goes on to say, "It lies in the suggestion — which such correlated or adjusted physical and psychical facts must impress upon us that just as we now know an eye to be an apparatus which enables us to appreciate the facts and phenomena of light, so our intellect as a whole is likewise an apparatus which enables us to apprehend those higher facts and relations between things and phenomena which constitute intellectual truth.”

To discourse at all in detail upon the polarization of light would be almost as much aside from the present purpose, as it would be beyond the abilities of the writer. It is sufficient here to remark the fact, and leave the details of it to the painstaking men of science, who are competent to deal with them. The fact is this. When a ray of light passes through certain transparent substances at certain angles, it is found to have properties unlike what it had before. It is the same ray of light, yet it has come to be in certain respects unlike and opposite to itself. The same

phenomenon appears sometimes in reflected light, as a French scientist discovered, by observing an image of the sun mirrored in the windows of the Luxembourg palace. The light thus reflected had properties unlike what it had as it came directly from the sun. The same sunlight had a certain contrast and contrariety to itself. This is the phenomenon which has come to be known in physics as the polarity of light. It is a remarkable fact, considered in itself. No less is it a remarkable fact, when considered as type and shadow of a like phenomenon in the spiritual world.

Truth has its polarity, as well as light, the accepted symbol of truth. "All truth is one," we find it often convenient to affirm. And the affirmation is always entirely safe; as safe as to say that the sunlight is one; as safe as to say that the magnet is one piece of metal. Indeed, the unity of all truth is the prime axiom, a kind of common denominator, to which all the axioms are reducible. But the very fact that we find it so often convenient, not to say necessary, to affirm the unity of all truth, what does it signify, but that truth has its polarity as well as its unity? Truth, while it is all one, has "that quality, in virtue of which it exhibits opposite or contrasted properties or powers, in opposite or contrasted parts or directions." Even within the same field, the truth often shows a remarkable unlikeness and opposition to itself; as the magnet repels at one end what it attracts at the other; as the sunlight, reflected from palace windows, did not behave like itself. And this is the case especially when truth passes through the medium of statement or is reflected in the mirror of thought. The direct sunlight is always unpolarized. Its polarity becomes observable, after it has come from crystal or mirror. In like manner the polarity of truth becomes observable, when it is subjected to the process of statement or reasoning. There are great truths which it is no more possible to reduce to a single statement, than it is possible to have a magnet with a single pole, or with its two poles identical. If anything like justice is to be done to such truths in the way of statement, the form of statement must be double. And the one statement will have in it a certain contrariety to the other. What is affirmed in the one appears to be denied in the other, as to the school-boy the minus sign at one pole of the magnet appears to negative the plus sign at the other pole. But as a matter of fact, the two statements do not contradict each other. So far from that, they supplement and reënforce each other. Neither statement holds so much of the truth as when it is held alongside the

other. Bend your magnet into a horseshoe, bringing its opposite poles alongside each other, and you bring to bear its full magnetic force. So truth in many cases is brought to bear in its full practical force, by taking advantage of its polarity, by holding it, and by stating it so as to bring its opposite poles alongside of each other.

There are instances enough to be cited of this phenomenon in the spiritual world so significantly symbolized by the physical fact of polarity. The few there is space for here may be confined to the single field of what is commonly known as revealed truth, the truth which is more especially set forth and applied in the teaching of Scripture.

We meet at the outset with a remarkable instance of polarity in the great truth which is fundamental to all the teaching of Scripture, the being of God. God is revealed to us in Scripture, on the one hand by the attributes of infinity, on the other hand by the attributes of personality. Any statement made of this great truth of the divine existence must be really the two statements. And each will necessarily be in language that may easily be construed into denial of the other. If you lay down the single statement, "God is the Infinite, the Absolute," you take the risk of seeming to deny his personality. If your single proposition be "God is personal," you take the risk of seeming to deny his infinity. The attributes of personality carry with them a certain suggestion of limitation, which puts them in opposition to the attributes of infinity. How is one to get on with such truth? He has simply to recognize and accept it as a case of polarity. The two statements require to be affirmed side by side. Both are equally true; both are statements of the same truth. Neither of them is so much the truth as when it is held alongside the other.

It is another instance of the polarity of truth that we meet with when, under the full light of gospel revelation, the one living God is made known to us as having a certain threefold distinction within himself. How great the difficulty of stating the oneness of God so as to leave room for the gospel distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, will be readily recognized here. And quite as easily will be recognized the difficulty of putting the Trinitarian distinctions into a statement that will pass without being challenged as a denial of the unity of God. But the difficulty is no evidence that both statements cannot be true. It is the same kind of a difficulty that the physicist meets with, when he must attribute to the same magnet, or the same ray of light, certain