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the ages.

FACTS AND THEIR MEANING. ·

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and universal truths. As certain is it that great physical discoveries have never been the result merely of laborious analysis, or of conscious induction; they must be traced to quite another source. Let us dwell for a moment upon this. The facts of the material world lie before men throughout Generation after generation gazes at them, and discerns nothing beyond the dead letter of the bare phenomena. At last a gifted man arises, whose eyes are opened to see in them that which no one had before seen; who reads their meaning and formulates their law. What is it that enables him to do this? An intuition of genius. And what is an intuition of genius? What, but a virtuality, an energy, a presentiment, a divination, of the intellect? It is perfectly true that the discoverer uses the experimental method to test and verify this prophetic anticipation. It is equally true that an idea a priori, is his primum movens, his point of departure. Let us again hear the Seer of these latter days. There are latent, Goethe tells us, in the subject, the human intellect, ideas, corresponding with laws hitherto unknown in the object, external nature: the man of genius, suddenly, as in a flash of lightning, sees revealed, in the microcosm within, the formula which is realised in the macrocosm without. But, if we have in our intellect ideal conceptions corresponding with the laws of the phenomenal world, if there exists in our minds the intuition of those

laws, if those ideal conceptions, that intuition, are the very source and fount of great discoveries in physics, if external nature would be a dead letter to us without the interpretation supplied by the proper activity, the spontaneity of the intellect, surely there is an answer, complete and conclusive, to the dogmatism which insists upon experience and analysis as the only instruments of knowledge. If physicists, both in their primary processes and in their ultimate triumphs, are absolutely dependent upon the hyperphysical, let us hear no more of purely physical methods as the sole roads to truth.

But, further, the physical sciences, as it seems to me, also furnish us with a refutation of the dogma, so persistently preached by their professors, that they yield the only explanation of the universe to which we may attain. Gcethe, in the aphorism from which I have quoted, goes on to tell us, in words of high poetic inspiration, what is the true significance of that identity-apprehended, indeed, but for a moment, and by a few richly-gifted intelligences-between the intuitive sense and the external reality. "It is a revelation, which develops itself from within to without, and which gives man a presentiment of his likeness to Deity. It is a synthesis of the world and of the intellect, which bestows upon us a most delightful assurance of the eternal harmony of being." Genius, whether manifested in physical research, or else

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THE ULTIMATE EXPLANATION.

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where, holds of the noumenal.

It conducts us

beyond phenomena to individuality, to spontaneity, to true causality. It lifts the veil of Mâya, and shows us the universe, not as monotonous and inflexible machinery, but as an organism, where all movements tend to ends, all forces obey reason, whether consciously or not. It points to a reality transcending that which is apprehensible by the senses, aided by the mechanical appliances, which so marvellously extend their scope and rectify their imperfections. It proclaims that, if we would discern that reality, we must turn our glance inward: it bids us seek the ultimate explanation of "the deep mysterious miracles" of nature, in the depths of our own consciousness. I confess that, as I turn over the works of some of the contem

porary teachers of physical science most highly and most justly honoured, I say to myself, "These men cannot read their own writing." With one consent they witness that, however immeasurably distant from our knowledge may be the cause of the objective universe, yet every part of it, when examined, is found to be intelligible: is governed by that reason wherein we too consist. They agree with the dictum of Hegel "Was wirklich ist, ist vernunftig." Reason everywhere, in the microcosm

* I forget who it is that has remarked, "When philosophers by banishing the old teleology from Nature divested her of understanding (Verstand), they had not the courage to endow her with reason (Vernunft), and so they left her spiritless (geistlos)."

of the leaf and the macrocosm of the fixed stars, as in the mind of man-that is the lesson of every page of their books. And yet they will not say, "I believe in God." If they take "God" to mean an Almighty Clockmaker enthroned in the sky, a "magnified, non-natural" Clergyman, a Lord High Executioner of the universe, I hold my peace and breathe no word against them. But must they not confess Eternal Energy, Supreme Causality, Objective Reason?

They may say, No. But they cannot, in the long run, think it, however much they may try. The proof is not far to seek. I know of nothing more striking-I will even say pathetic-than the evidence, supplied by their own writings, how futile is their attempt to rest in naturalism; how irresistible their need of "an ampler ether, a diviner air," than the phenomenal; how imperious their longing to break through the prison of the senses into the liberty of ideas. Thus, Professor Huxley, while prophesying the advance of "the realm of matter and law until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, with action," recognizes "the necessity for cherishing the noblest and most human of man's emotions by worship, mostly of the silent sort, at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable." Thus, Professor Tyndall, in his famous Belfast Address, after reducing all things to matter and motion, makes profession of faith in Kant's transcendental idealism. Thus, Mr. Herbert Spencer

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THE SPECTRE OF THE ABSOLUTE.

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turns from his doctrine of force and the persistence of force, whereby he empties of Deity the wondrous All, and exhibits it as a senseless mechanism, to tell us that the Relative cannot exist, cannot even be conceived of, without the Absolute; owns to an inclination to regard "symbolically" the universe as instinct with "a quasi-psychical principle; nay, more, recognizes as the most certain of certainties, though transcending knowledge and concepception, an unknown and unknowable Power, with out limit in space, without beginning or end in time. Thus, M. Littré, the second founder of Positivism, who insists so strongly that we must banish the notion of the Infinite, ends by recognising "Immensity physical and intellectual, as a positive idea of the first order"-an idea, the contemplation of which "is not less salutary than formidable;" and, in language of religious reverence, betakes himself to the contemplation of this entity "upon the throne of his sombre grandeur." Thus, a new school of Positivists, not specially associated with any one name, allows a Demiurgic Power which has shaped from the formless void of primitive elements the worlds that have been and now are; which will shape the illimitable series of worlds to come, when this universe shall have faded like the stuff that dreams are made of, and its constituent atoms shall have entered into other combinations. I cite but a few out of a great cloud of witnesses. But they are sufficient. The philosophy of relativity will