The world
would be a serial novel, to be continued for ever, and all men mere
novel-readers.
Nothing is more familiar to philosophers nowadays than that criticism
of knowledge by which we are thrown back upon the appearances from
which science starts, upon what is known to children and savages,
whilst all that which long experience and reason may infer from those
appearances is set down as so much hypothesis; and indeed it is
through hypothesis that latent being, if such there be, comes before
the mind at all. Now such criticism of knowledge might have been
straightforward and ingenuous. It might have simply disclosed the
fact, very salutary to meditate upon, that the whole frame of nature,
with the minds that animate it, is disclosed to us by intelligence;
that if we were not intelligent our sensations would exist for us
without meaning anything, as they exist for idiots. The criticism of
knowledge, however, has usually been taken maliciously, in the sense
that it is the idiots only that are not deceived; for any
interpretation of sensation is a mental figment, and while experience
may have any extent it will it cannot possibly, they say, have
expressive value; it cannot reveal anything going on beneath.
Intelligence and science are accordingly declared to have no
penetration, no power to disclose what is latent, for nothing latent
exists; they can at best furnish symbols for past or future sensations
and the order in which they arise; they can be seven-league boots for
striding over the surface of sentience.
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