APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

Hokitika Guardian, 9 January 1932, Page 1

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

If the question is asked, What then do we know about matter and motion '? there is hut one reply possible. All that we know about motion j.s that it is a name for certain changes in the relations of our visual, tactile, and muscular sensations; and all that we know about matter is that it k the hypothetical substance oil -physical phenomena, the assumption of the existence of which is as pure a piece of metaphysical speculation as is that of the existence of the substance of mind. Our sensations, our pleasures, our pains and the relations of these, make up the sum total of the elements of positive, unquestionable knowledge. We call a large .section of these sensations and their relations matter and motion; the rest we term mind and thinking; and experience shows that there is a certain constant order of succession between some of the former and some of the latter.

This is all that just metaphysical criticism leaves of the idols set up by the sjiuripus metaphysics of vulgar common sense. It is consistent either with pure Materialism or with pure Idealism, but it is neither, l-’or the Idealist, not content with declaring the truth that our knowkledge is limited to facts of consciousness, affirms the wholly improvable proposition that nothing exists beyond these and the substance of mind. And, on the other hand, the Materialist, holding by the truth that, for anything that appears to the contrary, material phenomena are the causes of mental phenomena, asserts his improvable dogma, that material phenomena and the substanc of matter are the sole primary existences. Strike out tbe propositions about which neither controversialist docs or can know anything, and there is nothing left for them to quarrel about. Make a desert of the Unknowable, and the divine Astracn of philosophic peace will commence her blessed reign.