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Updated: May 28, 2025
Nor is it only in the realm of scientific knowing that postulation reveals itself as a practicable and successful method of anticipating experience and consolidating fact. The 'truths' of all religions originate in postulates. 'Gods' and 'devils, 'heavens' and 'hells, are essentially demands for a moral order in experience which transcend the given.
But unless we hold, what seems to me an uncalled-for opinion, that the essential feature of Materialism consists in a postulation of a causal connection between x and y, it would appear that the only effect of supposing x and y to be really but one substance z, must be that of strengthening the essential doctrine of Materialism the doctrine, namely, that conscious intellectual existence is necessarily associated with that form of existence which we know phenomenally as Matter and Motion.
But Science has been reluctant to recognise that it is now entitled to dispense with the postulation of Matter. The theory, as announced by the leading men of science, has therefore been to the effect that there exist in the physical universe two real things Matter and Energy in place of one only, as commonly supposed for so long.
His strength lay in the postulation of problems, the stimulation and direction of inquiry, the discovery of lacunae and the throwing out of suggestions; and many ideas incidentally thrown off by him surprise us by their ingenious anticipations of later discoveries. The greatest defect in his theory was his complete failure to recognize the services promised by mathematics to natural science.
The postulation of 'causes' is verified by its success. Moreover, it is to be noted that to this postulate there is no alternative. A belief that all events are casual would be scientifically worthless. For that is merely to reinstate the given chaos science tried to analyse, and to forbid us to make selections from it.
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.
The unquestioned acceptance of the Aristotelian logic has led to an ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness, namely, to look below what we are aware of for the substance in the sense of the 'concrete thing. This is the origin of the modern scientific concept of matter and of ether, namely they are the outcome of this insistent habit of postulation.
But such a conclusion is wholly incompatible with the religious mind. It must assume that there are some common truths, true infinitely, and therefore, that in all intelligence there is an essential unity of kind. “This postulation,” says a close thinker, “is the very foundation and essence of religion.
But no marked break in the setting of the idea had arisen. And this fact presents the thinker with a problem. In its origins, religion is innately hostile to the extension of impersonal causation to the cosmos, for the obvious reason that such a conception conflicts with the operation of special agency. Religion begins with the postulation of powerful agents whom man can placate.
Well, if this is done, we have the postulation of a Being which is self-existing, infinite, and eternal relatively, at all events, to our powers of conception.
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