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faculty and more vivid imagination, there comes a power of perceiving to be necessary truths, what were before not recognized as truths at all. . . . All this which holds of logical and mathematical truths, holds, with change of terms, of physical truths. There are necessary truths in Physics for the apprehension of which, also, a developed and disciplined intelligence is required; and before such intelligence arises, not only may there be failure to apprehend the necessity of them, but there may be vague beliefs in their contraries. But though many are incapable of grasping physical axioms, it no more follows that physical axioms are not knowable à priori by a developed intelligence, than it follows that logical relations are not necessary, because undeveloped intellects cannot perceive their necessity.

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"The terms 'à priori truth' and 'necessary truth'. . . are to be interpreted," he continues, "not in the old sense, as implying cognitions wholly independent of experiences, but as implying cognitions that have been rendered organic by immense accumulations of experiences, received partly by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals whose nervous systems he inherits. But when during mental evolution, the vague ideas arising in a nervous structure imperfectly organized, are replaced by clear ideas arising in a definite nervous structure; this definite structure, molded by experience into correspondence with external phenomena, makes necessary in thought the relations answering to absolute uniformities in things. Hence, among others, the conception of the Indestructibility of Matter. . . . Our inability to conceive Matter becoming non-existent, is immediately consequent upon the nature of thought. It must be

added, that no experimental verification of the truth that Matter is indestructible, is possible without a tacit assumption of it. For all such verification implies weighing, and weighing implies that the matter forming the weight remains the same. In other words, the proof that certain matter dealt with in certain ways is unchanged in quantity, depends on the assumption that other matter otherwise dealt with is unchanged in quantity."

In answer to the above it can be said:

First. The current explanation of the existence of Matter is that it was created by an external agency. Mr. Spencer's lucid statement of the way in which Matter has been proved

indestructible does not go far enough. Where he stops, logic might justly pronounce the whole procedure a fallacious one, a begging of the whole question at issue. The binding force, of the whole argument rests upon a rational principle here overlooked by Mr. Spencer, the principle of sufficient cause. The chemist in making the experiment found that certain substances counterbalanced a given weight; after combustion, the products counterbalanced the same weight. If the weight did not change during the experiment, then no matter had been destroyed. The weight is believed not to have changed, because it existed. under ordinary and quiescent conditions: which, in view of past race experience, rendered it extremely improbable that any force sufficient to vitiate the result had come into play during the experiment. The absence of a sufficient cause to change the weight, is, then, the critical point of the argument, and the perfect trust of the mind in the principle of sufficient cause forces us to the conclusion that Matter is indestructible.

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What has really been accomplished, however, by the experiment? I do not object to the statement that Matter is indestructible, but the meaning of this explicitly stated, is that in the light of the present knowledge of the race, we have experimented with Matter under certain extreme conditions some chemical changes seeming, at first glance, to annihilate it and have not been able to destroy it, therefore, Matter is indestructible. While this is true to an extent which preserves the integrity of the foundation for our Science and our Philosophy, it is at the same time consistent with the hypothesis that a Being surpassing man in intelligence and power, may be able to convert Matter into a not-matter-from the standpoint of present definitions of Matter and Space-quantitatively correlated with it, or vice versa; and this statement of the case harmonizes Science and Religion. Now, what from the point of view of Science Mr. Spencer accepts as indestructibility, is identical with what Religion means when it affirms self-existence, and as he has demonstrated to his own satisfaction that selfexistence in the abstract is an illegitimate conception, a conception of what by its very nature is unknowable, because it involves the impossible conception of infinite past-time, he is logically bound by accepting one horn of the dilemma, to

admit the conception of self-existence into the realm of the Knowable, or by choosing the other, to transfer his "Indestructibility," his "possibility of exact Science" into the realm of the Unknowable! In either event, we place an ultimate religious idea and a scientific conception whose denial he admits to be the annihilation of exact Science, upon the same footing, and so reduce the distinguishing characteristic which he has set up to differentiate the Knowable from the Unknowable, to zero.

Second. We come now to the statement of some of the consequences which follow from Mr. Spencer's view-already explained-as to how the higher warrant, by which we know the Indestructibility of Matter to be an axiom, a self-evident truth, originated. In his chapter upon "Ultimate Scientific Ideas" he says that Space and Time are "wholly incomprehensible," and that "Matter . . . in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as Space and Time." He affirms, as pointed out, that no experimental verification is possible without assuming what we set out to prove. If the chemical balance cannot demonstrate this truth, how, then, can we know it? It is, we are told, an à priori or necessary truth which arises in our consciousness through the "cognitions that have been rendered organic by immense accumulations of experiences, received partly by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals whose nervous systems" we inherit. This is Mr. Spencer's answer. This commits us to the absurdity, that the truth of the doctrine of the Indestructibility of Matter has come to be accepted as axiomatic by the repetition of cognitions of an inconceivable "absolute uniformity" of things, by an indefinite series of ancestors, in the face of the fact that the present development of Science does not now permit us, with the aid of all its apparatus, to receive a single logically valid cognition from the same phenomenal world which supplied all the others; ergo, add together a sufficient number of cognitions of the inconceivable, and you arrive at an axiomatic truth! To lift a ton weight, apply a vast number of forces of one ounce intensity, acting successively in time, and the thing is done!

Mr. Spencer cannot point out the characteristics which separate those inconceivable things and qualities which may legitimately furnish the raw material for the development of

axioms, from those which cannot, since this would at once remove them to the category of the conceivable, and he cannot exhaustively catalogue the axioms, since the process of evolution which he puts forth as the sole and sufficient explanation of their origin and growth is still going on. We therefore see that we are justified in saying that conceivability is worthless as a test as to whether an object of thought lies within the domain of the Knowable or Unknowable. Further, should a theologian say to Mr. Spencer “To me, the existence of God and his Infinite Love, Wisdom, and Power rank as axioms," I do not see how, consistently with the above, he could deny that these truths were valid to the theologian, even if they were not so to his own mind. How completely we have placed Religion and Science upon the same level is evident from our author's statement that “a religious creed is definable as a theory of original causation" and from the fact that a self-existent Universe is one of the three possible hypotheses which he mentions in his argument.

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Space forbids the criticism of Mr. Spencer's doctrine of the relativity of knowledge and of the speculations concerning the Infinite and Absolute based upon the writings of Hamilton and Mansel. I have been restricted, also, to the negative side of the question, but so far as inconceivability enters as a factor into the argument against Religion, I contend that it has broken down; that so far as that element affects the problem, Religion has as high credentials as Science.

THE BETTER PART.

BY WILLIAM ALLEN DROMGOOLE.

SOME barks there are that drift dreamily down stream, ever near to the shore where the waters are shallow. Some catch the current and go bounding on with sweep and swirl until the river, placid at last, slips into the tideless Everlasting. Some, alas! commanded by iron-hearted Fate, are headed up stream to fight-who dares call it Folly's battle? - against the current which yields only to the invincible will and the tireless arm. They lie who swear that life turns on mere accident. There are no accidents in fate. The end is but a gathering of the means; the means but byways to the end; and at the last fate is master still, and we its victims are, as was she, my Claudia.

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I am an old woman, childless and loveless; I know what it is to stand alone with life's hollow corpses, corpses of youth, and love, and hope. Perhaps this is why my heart turned to her in her sweet youth and guileless innocence. used to fancy, when I saw her, a child under the old-fashioned locust's shade that fell about her father's modest place, that she was unlike other children. She had a thoughtful facenot beautiful, but soulful. I thank God now that the child was spared that curse. Fate set snares enough without that deadliest one of beauty. Yet she had soul; her eyes betrayed its strength and mirrored its deep passion, that mightiest, holiest passion which men call genius. Her genius merely budded; fate set its heel against the plant and crushed it.

I knew her from her birth; knew her strong-hearted mother, and her gentle father, who slipped the noose of life when Claudia was a tiny thing, too young to more than lisp his name. Yet, with his last breath he blessed her, and blessed the man into whose arms he placed her, and left her to his

care.

"You have said you owe me something," said the dying man; "if so, pay it to my child, my girl-babe, in fatherly advice and guidance."

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