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And he has nothing of the pathos of Du Bois-Reymond’s “ignorabimus.” He is the neutral, prosaic scientist, who will let nothing “tempt him to a transcendental consideration,” either theological or naturalistic, who holds tenaciously to matters of fact, who, without absolutely rejecting a general theory, will not concern himself about it, except to point out every difficulty in the way of it; in short, he is the representative of a mood that is the ideal of every investigator and the despair of every theoriser.
No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of Physical Religion in the effort to force unification of the universe; they had protested with mild conviction that they could not state the geological record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus under their breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on the tips of their tongues.
As is well known, DuBois-Reymond, in his previously-mentioned lecture upon "The Limits of our Knowledge of Nature," declares the origin of sensation and of consciousness to be one of two limits, beyond which we have not only to say "ignoramus," but "ignorabimus."
The closing word of the discourse, "ignorabimus," was translated as a present, and this "ignoramus" taken to mean that "we know nothing at all"; or, even worse, that "we can never come to clearness about anything, and any further talk about the matter is idle."
And this is why an interminable string of notes of interrogation serves as the decorative motive of this new science, which might be more appropriately styled: ignorabimus.
I believe that the solution of these fundamental questions still lies as yet beyond the limits of our knowledge of nature, and that we shall be obliged, for a long time yet to come, to content ourselves with an "Ignoramus" if not even with an "Ignorabimus."
The atom, unity of the spirit and of consciousness, the validity of perception, all these are under suspicion today. Ignoramus, ignorabimus. Nevertheless, we call ourselves materialists.
If we neglect in a mathematical sense those who adopt the agnostic attitude; content themselves with the formula ignoramus et ignorabimus of Du Bois Reymond, and confine their investigations to the machine as a going machine without inquiring how it came to be a machine or what set it to work, we shall, I think, find that most people who have really thought out the question admit that the only reasonable explanation of things as they are, is the postulation of a Free First Cause; in other words, an Omnipotent Creator of the universe.
For myself, I must confess that I find the air of this region of speculation too rarefied for my constitution, and I am disposed to take refuge in 'ignoramus et ignorabimus.
It is usual at the same time to appeal to Du Bois-Reymond's well-known "Ignorabimus address on the Boundaries of Natural Knowledge" . It was by a peculiar irony of fate that the famous lecturer of the Berlin Academy of Science, in this much-discussed address of twenty years ago, should be representing consciousness as an incomprehensible marvel, and as presenting an insuperable barrier to further advances of knowledge, at the very moment that David Friedrich Strauss, the greatest theologian of our century, was showing it to be the opposite.
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