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CREATION.
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because the perplexity is of our own making, we can allow ourselves to be as deeply entangled in its meshes as we please. • To continue with our examination of modern science, matter has been seen to be insufficient to explain the phenomena of consciousness, notwithstanding that scientists have endeavoured to evade the difficulty by exaggerating its function. This is not the only diff - culty in the way of modern science; for it has little or no knowledge of even Time and Space, though it is familiar with the ubiquitous ether, the necessary medium of motion. As regards Time and Space, some idea of the confusion of thought prevailing amongst modern writers might be formed by a perusal of the following deliberate opinion of Herbert Spencer, one of England's greatest philosophers :
“We cannot conceive Space and Time as entities, and are equally disabled from conceiving them as attributes of entities or as nonentities............. The immediate knowledge which we seem to have of them proves, when examined, to be total ignorance" (The First Principles).
Kant, the great German philosopher, had already, before the time of Herbert Spencer, declared Space and Time to be pure à priori forms of understanding; but this did not satisfy the English thinker who said :--
“The proposition with which Kant's philosophy sets out, verbally intelligible though it is, cannot by any effort be rendered into thought - cannot be interpreted into an idea properly so called, but stands merely for a pseud-idea. In the first place to assert that space and Time are subjective conditions is, by implication, to assert that they are not objective realities; if the Space and Time present to our minds belong to the ego, then of necessity they do not belong to the non-ego. Now it is impossible to think this. The very fact on which Kant bases his hypothesis-namely, that our consciousness of
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