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Its materialism, its attribution to nature of power sufficient to carry out all her ends, its analysis of matter into ultimate physical individua incognisable by sense, while yet it insists that the senses are the fountains of all knowledge, are points which bring it into correspondence with hypotheses at present predominant.
The questions multiplied with the smoke-wreaths and in the blue haze which enveloped him, Kenneth Gregory beheld his vague and intangible suspicions gradually crystallizing into three fundamental hypotheses: Something crooked was being pulled off at Diablo. Rock and Bandrist were back of it.
But I have also said, in examining the history of those principles, that if they are to-day considered experimental truths, independent of all theories relating to matter, they have, in fact, nearly all been discovered by scholars who relied on molecular hypotheses: and the question suggests itself whether this is mere chance, or whether this chance may not be ordained by higher reasons.
When the conclusion is at last arrived at that it has irrecoverably disappeared all sorts of hypotheses will be started to account for it; some will think that it probably wandered to the hills and became the prey of hyenas or other wild beasts; some will assert that it has been killed and hidden away; others that it has made its way down to the Nile and has been carried off by a crocodile.
But I need not tell you that there is an enormous difference in the value of the two hypotheses. That one which is based on sound scientific knowledge is sure to have a corresponding value; and that which is a mere hasty random guess is likely to have but little value. Every great step in our progress in discovering causes has been made in exactly the same way as that which I have detailed to you.
Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter.
I can assure a general that, with such precautions, nothing very unexpected can befall him and cause his ruin, as has so often happened to others; for, unless he is totally unfit to command an army, he should at least be able to form reasonable suppositions as to what the enemy is going to do, and fix for himself a certain line of conduct to suit each of these hypotheses.
We can briefly indicate in advance the result to which it will lead us, viz.: that the descent theory has gained, the selection theory has lost ground, the theory of development oscillates between both; but that all three theories have not yet passed beyond the rank of hypotheses, although they have very unequal hypothetical value.
Lord Kelvin and the other physicists dissipated the idea of a molten interior of the earth. Hence, because these other false hypotheses have already in a measure been disposed of, as well as for the sake of brevity, I shall here discuss only the third of the prime postulates of the current system of geology, namely the theory of Successive Ages.
Such at least is the opinion of thinkers to-day, though this mutilation and leveling down of the most daring of Leibnitz's hypotheses was perhaps entirely advantageous for Wolff's impression on his contemporaries; what appeared questionable to him would no doubt have repelled them also.
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