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other notional absurdities of the intellect who would find out how that was done, and how far their wrong theories of the universe were of practical worth in the use made of them to guide and sanction the real forces at work in social development. Prediction was but a small, and that probably the least valuable, part of the work done by the great oracles of ancient Greece. Even discoverers of a law of gravitation, however high their just pretensions, cannot afford to despise the condensed and, so to speak, silent knowledge which is implicit in the social growth from scattered tribes of wandering savages to a strong and settled barbarous nation.

There is always a fund of wisdom in the common sense and practical instincts of the common people, the instruction whereof philosophy misses when it neglects or disdains to take sufficient account of it. Having to deal with the stern realities of life, working men are compelled to have working beliefs in order to act; feeling instinctively that the best test of the value of a belief is-Will it work? they turn their backs impatiently upon empty abstractions and demand beliefs with real contents. For example, persons of culture who make for themselves the dismayful discovery that they cannot go on believing in a personal God, are happy to take refuge in more general terms and abstractions, such as Deism and

Pantheism, and make mighty use of them; but the labouring classes, rejecting such barren metaphysical abstractions, either repudiate God altogether or demand that, if there be a God who ruleth the earth, He shall be a real living God, working in the events of the world as they do themselves; not an abstract absolute, emptied of contents and living only in the misty regions of speculative thought, but "a literal, personal, and eternal God." Thus they, by their practical instincts, escape those self-deceiving effects of abstractions by which philosophers sometimes seek and discover the explanation of a concrete fact in what is no more than the abstract statement of the very same fact: the sleep-producing effects of opium in the soporific virtues of that drug; the evolution of the universe from the like to the unlike in a self-determining instability of the homogeneous, whereby it starts on heterogeneous tracks of stabler being; the determination of self in an abstract will ; the moral sanction of individual conduct in the authority of an abstract morality, which thereupon becomes a metaphysical entity or a spiritual inspiration from without; the self-revealing functions of mind in an abstract consciousness; and the like verbal sophisms.

§ Uniformities of Experience.

If it be asked of the rustic how he is sure that from one sort of seed will spring one sort of plant after he has buried it in the earth, and from another sort of seed another sort of plant, he will be likely to answer that any fool knows that much, because even a fool cannot fail to notice so common and constant a succession of events; and if the astronomer be asked how it is that he foretells with such precision so amazing a result at so vast a distance of time, he will say, if he be not prompted by scientific vanity to make a mystery of his calling, that every astronomer who knows his business can do it as well as he can. In both cases the reasoned inference rests upon the observation of uniformities of experience, and in neither case has it any authority other than experience not individual experience alone, it may be, but the slowly gained and consolidated experience of the race embodied in the general statement or so called law. So long as the uniformity of nature is as it is, so long must men, constituted as they are, continue to conclude with confidence, from certain coexistences and sequences of events within their experience, as to future coexistences and sequences; and so long as they do that they will be liable, from imperfect observations, as they always have been, to

make mistakes by supposing connections that are occasional and accidental to be invariable and essential -by believing casual to be causal events.

It is notoriously a hard matter to conceive that which contradicts uniform experience, and a harder matter still to believe it. If two things or events are always seen together, they are inevitably thought of together, and thereupon believed to be bound together by an inseverable tie, not in the mind alone, but in the nature of things. They would be so certainly if the mind were fully and exactly sensitive to every atom and force, separate and combined, in the universe, and to their several relations-if, in fact, being commensurate with it, it were omnisensible and omniscient; but as that is very far from being the case, the tie may or may not be, and most often will not be, absolute. Easy and abundant occasions of error present themselves at every turn. A wider experience and a larger reach of reason may prove the association supposed invariable to be no more than accidental, or at any rate not to be invariable. All swans were believed to be white until a black swan was seen for the first time, "swan" and "whiteness' being two notions that always went together; for a long time it was inconceivable and incredible that there could be people at the other side of the earth, since, if there were, they must be walking with their

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heads downwards; and it is still inconceivable to many persons that a body in motion would go on moving at the same velocity if it were not acted upon by some new force. In these cases the contradictory experiences suffice to correct the erroneous generalizations. But contradictory instances have not always an equal success to overthrow false conclusions. The general, once accepted, is very apt to be invested with an authority greater than it has obtained from actual experience, or than any actual experience could give it, and so to survive in spite of experience. It has truly greater authority than individual experience, because it represents the common or generalized experience of the kind; and therefore it is that it is by many thought to be above experience altogether, the real source of its higher authority being overlooked. Nay, it is itself only too ready, once it has got launched into vogue, to resent its real origin, and to kick down the humble ladder of experience by whose steps it has been raised to its abstract dignity.

That which we have uniformly felt and thought and made the adjustment of our natures to, becomes a part of our mental structure-a fundamental form of thought, if invariable in human experience; wherefore to change or reverse the constant experience, and especially to introduce a new and quite strange expe

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