Page:Truth and Error (1898).djvu/13

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CHUAR'S ILLUSION
3

camp on the brink of the canyon, I told Chuar that he was a great traveler, and that I knew of two other great travelers among the seers of the East, one by the name of Hegel, and another by the name of Spencer, and that I should ever remember these three wise men, who spoke like words of wisdom, for it passed through my mind that all three of these philosophers had reified void and founded a philosophy thereon.

Concepts of number, space, motion, time and judgment are developed by all minds, from that of the lowest animal to that of the highest human genius. Through the evolution of animal life, these concepts have been growing as they have been inherited down the stream of time in the flood of generations. It is thus that an experience has been developed, combined with the experience of all the generations of life for all the time of life, which makes it impossible to expunge from human mind these five concepts. They can never be canceled while sanity remains. Things having something more than number, space, motion, time and judgment cannot even be invented; it is not possible for the human mind to conceive anything else, but semblances of such ideas may be produced by the mummification of language.

Ideas are expressed in words which are symbols, and the word may be divested of all meaning in terms of number, space, motion, time and judgment and still remain, and it may be claimed that it still means something unknown and unknowable; this is the origin of reification. There are many things unknown at one stage of experience which are known at another, so man comes to believe