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It has been remarked that man’s senses were given him, not to philosophise with, but to help him in the struggle for existence; Boltzmann, the great German physicist, was frankly distrustful of many of the natural motions of the mind. He could admit that Science, although often very abstract, had a certain validity, since it issues in the prediction of events which are accessible to sense perception. But philosophy, he insisted, was in an altogether different case, and he thought the chances considerable that its impalpable conclusions were the merest moonshine. It is a speculation that must have exercised everyone who has wholeheartedly accepted the evolutionary account of the rise of intelligence. Why should this instrument be adapted to uses other than its original ones? Doubts of this kind, however, are both too vague and too comprehensive to serve any useful purpose. They do not tell us in what way and to what extent our intelligence is untrustworthy; they do not enable us to make one step towards drawing[Pg 50] up an Index of Forbidden Subjects. At the most, they allow a man with a constitutional dislike of philosophic speculations to indulge his contempt for that occupation with an easy conscience.
Nevertheless, a tincture of this doubt is very wholesome, and more particularly if it be the result of an acquaintance with the history of human thought rather than the product of a kind of lazy a priori scepticism. A student of the history of…
