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Updated: May 1, 2025
Nowhere else, within the records of human follies, do we find a corresponding case, in which the government and the patrician orders in the state, taking for granted, and absolutely postulating the utter worthlessness for intellectual aims of those in and by whom they maintained their own grandeur and independence, undisguisedly and even professedly sought to ally themselves with a foreign literature, foreign literati, and a foreign language.
Such a disembodied existence, removed by its nature from the sphere of empirical evidence, might nevertheless be actual, and grounds of a moral or metaphysical type might be sought for postulating its reality. Life and the will to live are at bottom identical.
The little book went on to argue logically enough that God, being almighty, must possess the wonderful power of sight which we have been postulating for our observer; and further, that being omnipresent, He must be at each of the stations which we mentioned, and also at every intermediate point, not successively but simultaneously.
Taking this as a starting point, I began to consider the mobility of the Earth; and although the idea seemed absurd, yet because I knew that the liberty had been granted to others before me to postulate all sorts of little circles for explaining the phenomena of the stars, I thought I also might easily be permitted to try whether by postulating some motion of the Earth, more reliable conclusions could be reached regarding the revolution of the heavenly bodies, than those of my predecessors.
Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events, which, if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly.
He had formed a hypothesis which had at least ingenuity to recommend it, and I cannot do better than append it in his own words. "Whatever may be the truth," said he, "it must depend upon some bizarre and rare combination of events, so we need have no hesitation in postulating such events in our explanation.
Still more searching are the questions that they ask when they see the great powers that have been fortunate enough to emerge victorious from the struggle still postulating the superiority of Western civilisation as sufficient grounds for denying to other races who do not share it or have only recently come under its influence the right to equal treatment.
To this theory it may be replied, as Professor Flournoy has replied in his Spiritism and Psychology, that it represents the grave methodological defect of multiplying causes without necessity; by postulating spirits and importing them into the problem when they are not wanted. It would be better to seek an explanation elsewhere. The Psycho-Physical Theory.
The impression made by his words was immediate but shortlived. It was effaced as easily as it had been evoked by an allocution from Mr Candidate Mulligan in that vein of pleasantry which none better than he knew how to affect, postulating as the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man.
There the chain of conditions could not be finished because it led on to infinity, where, however, it was required that it should be complete. Here again the chain is incomplete. In the previous case a solution is found through the naïve proceeding of simply breaking the empirical connection of conditions and postulating beginnings in time.
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