Introduction to science / by Alex Hill.

  • Alexander Hill
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introduction to science / by Alex Hill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    38/156 page 26
    ness. When reflecting upon the mental processes by which the materials supplied by the senses are worked into thought, the Mind is watching its own activities. By self-study a man acquires a knowledge of knowing, thoughts about thinking. He knows that he possesses consciousness. It is not that he is consciousness—merely a concomitant of a certain kind of nerve-activity. He owns a consciousness which he can direct and control ; from which it follows that there is a He to own it. But the two sources of information must never be confused. The lines of thought for which the external and the internal respectively supply materials are parallel, and neither diverging nor converging lines. A man’s consciousness gives him no more information with regard to his science, than his senses give him with regard to his conscious¬ ness. The two worlds are absolutely and permanently distinct. Science prosecutes its researches to the confines of the observable. Self-analysis is carried to the limits of con¬ sciousness. Each line of research is abandoned with a sense that there is something beyond. Beyond the know- able, the Unknowable. Beyond the self-conscious, the All- conscious. It is in this beyond that the philosophy of the Absolute weaves its system. It is this beyond that religion seeks to explain. Religion claims indeed that the world behind sense and the world beyond consciousness are one. “We know nothing beyond our simple ideas—which we are not at all to wonder at, since we, having but some super¬ ficial ideas of things, discovered to us only by the senses from without, or by the mind reflecting on what it experi¬ ments in itself within, have no knowledge beyond that, much less of the internal constitution and true nature of things, being destitute of faculties to attain it. And therefore ex¬ perimenting and discovering in ourselves knowledge and the power of voluntary motion, as certainly as we experiment or discover in things without us, the cohesion and separation of solid parts, which is the extension and motion of bodies ; we have as much reason to be satisfied with our notion of immaterial spirit, as with our notion of body ; and the exis-
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3