mena; but the modern observer has the almost
infinite advantage of being able to draw upon an immense store of
careful and accurate observations. A knowledge of the mistakes of
his predecessors has taught him the value of caution in interpreting
phenomena that seem to fall outside the range of such laws of nature
as experience has seemed to demonstrate. Again and again the old
metaphysical laws have been forced aside by observation; as, for
example, when Kepler showed that the planetary orbits are not circular,
and Galileo's telescope proved that the spot-bearing sun cannot be a
perfect body in the old Aristotelian sense.

New means of observation have from time to time opened up new fields,
yet with all the extensions of our knowledge we come, paradoxically
enough, to realize but the more fully the limitations of that knowledge.
We seem scarcely nearer to-day to a true understanding of the real
nature of the "forces" whose operation we see manifested about us than
were our most primitive ancestors. But in one great essential we have
surely progressed. We have learned that the one true school is the
school of experience; that metaphysical causes are of absolutely no
consequence unless they can gain support through tangible observations.
Even so late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great
thinker, Hegel, retaining essentially the Greek cast of thought, could
make the metaphysical declaration that, since seven planets were known,
and since seven is the perfect number, it would be futile to search for
other planets. But even as he made this declaration another planet was
found. It would be safe to say that no thinker of the present day would
challenge defeat in quite the Aristotelian or Hegelian manner; but,
on the other hand, it is equally little open to doubt that, in matters
slightly less susceptible of tangible demonstration, metaphysical
conceptions still hold sway; and as regards the average minds of our
time, it is perhaps not an unfair estimate to say they surely have not
advanced a jot beyond the Aristotelian stand-point. Untrained through
actual experience in any field of inductive science, they remain easy
victims of metaphysical reasoning. Indeed, since the conditions of
civilization throw a protecting influence about us, and make the
civilized man less amenable to results of illogical action than was the
barbarian, it may almost be questioned whether the average person of
to-day is the equal, as