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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
memorable words of one of the leading men of science, quoted by Sir Oliver Lodge
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"It is worth any amount of trouble to...know by one's own knowledge the great truth...that the honest and rigorous following up of the argument which leads us to materialism' inevitably carries us beyond......If the materialist affirms that the universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived or known; and the existence of a state of consciousness, apart from a thinking mind, is a contradiction in terms. I conceive this reasoning to be irrefragable. And, therefore, if I were obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative."
The opposition to the idea that the world is a dreamlike affair arises only when we forget that the description does not affect the nature of existing substances themselves in any way, and that the difference between Idealism and Realism lies not in respect of the existence or non-existence of the world, but solely and simply in the words employed to express our notion of what exists.
The denial of reality to the material world can never mean its total negation, or anything more than this that it is but a dream-like panorama composed of forms that dissolve, or begin to dissolve as soon as they are made, and of scenes which are impermanent and constantly changing. This changing and shifting aspect of things in nature is calculated to fill the mind with a sense of their impermanence, and may be likened to a dream for that reason. For, persistence being the test of reality, mind is apt to regard all that is impermanent as unreal. As Herbert Spencer points out :
"By reality we mean persistence in consciousness: a persistence which is either unconditional, as our consciousness of space, or
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