a firm footing on the reality of conscious ideas. To abandon this is annihilation.
Years ago an old friend of mine, very worthy, but somewhat self-opinioned and truculent, in a discussion on religious thought exclaimed: "What! believe in anything I can't see, touch, hear, smell, taste? No, sir!" He represented the uneducated instinctive belief in the reality of the outer world as revealed through the senses; and he would have violently affirmed the reliability of the senses and the existence of material things. But philosophy shows these also to be of faith.
Had he been asked whether he had a knowledge of space and time and of certain indisputable facts concerning them, and whether he could see or hear these entities and intuitive truths, he would have paused to think. The axioms of mathematics would have been a veritable Socratic poser to him, and he would have withdrawn from his position—would have acknowledged some truths as more certain, by the nature and need of the mind, than the existence of matter.
The modern scientist for practical purposes postulates the existence of conscious ideas, of the outer material world, of space and time. He accepts axiomatic truths. He goes farther; he postulates the uniformity of nature, and the validity of his reasoning processes. He discovers natural laws, and propounds theories concerning them. He investigates the physical correlates of mental processes. He has his favorite hypotheses concerning phenomena that defy his powers of analysis. He shows the process of the world as a whole to be evolution.
So far we have no controversy and should have
