cherished beliefs
more and more shaken, secretly fears that all things may some day be
explained; and has a corresponding dread of Science: thus evincing the
profoundest of all infidelity--the fear lest the truth be bad. On the
other hand, the sincere man of science, content to follow wherever the
evidence leads him, becomes by each new inquiry more profoundly
convinced that the Universe is an insoluble problem. Alike in the
external and the internal worlds, he sees himself in the midst of
ceaseless changes, of which he can discover neither beginning nor end.
If, tracing back the evolution of things, he allows himself to entertain
the hypothesis that all matter once existed in a diffused form, he finds
it impossible to conceive how this came to be so; and equally, if he
speculates on the future, he can assign no limit to the grand succession
of phenomena ever unfolding themselves before him. Similarly, if he
looks inward, he perceives that both terminations of the thread of
consciousness are beyond his grasp: he cannot remember when or how
consciousness commenced, and he cannot examine the consciousness at any
moment existing; for only a state of consciousness which is already past
can become the object of thought, and never one which is passing. When,
again, he turns from the succession of phenomena, external or internal,
to their essential nature, he is equally at fault. Though he may succeed
in resolving all properties of objects into manifestations of force, he
is not thereby enabled to conceive what force is; but finds, on the
contrary, that the more he thinks about it, the more he is baffled.
Similarly, though analysis of mental actions may finally bring him down
to sensations as the original materials out of which all thought is
woven, he is none the forwarder; for he cannot in the least comprehend
sensation. Inward and outward things he thus discovers to be alike
inscrutable in their ultimate genesis and nature. He sees that the
Materialist and Spiritualist controversy is a mere war of words; the
disputants being equally absurd--each believing he understands that
which it is impossible for any man to understand. In all directions his
investigations eventually bring him face to face with the unknowable;
and he ever more clearly perceives it to be the unknowable. He learns at
once the greatness and the littleness of human intellect--its power in
dealing with all that comes within the range of experience; its
impote