Thoughts on health and some of its conditions / [James Hinton].

  • Hinton, James, 1822-1875
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thoughts on health and some of its conditions / [James Hinton]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    indeed, accepted by the cultivators of science as an established fact, that the very reality of things is not within their sphere ; and this idea is embodied in a word that has grown into familiar use, but the real significance of which, being so much opposed to our ordinary thoughts, has not become equally familiar— the word “phenomena.” This term is merely a learned word for “appearances and when it is said —as it is said whenever the principles of science are discussed—that we only know phenomena, the mean- ing simply is that our observation and our thought penetrate only to appearances. Science deals, there- fore, with an apparent world. The facts which it affirms are true of appearances, and its command is over them. The true reality of nature remains beyond its grasp, and respecting that it is silent, save as it affirms that all the changing things with which our experience is concerned are appearances of an existence which does not share their change. Have we not well said, therefore, that science wins its triumphs in a fairy land, and in fulfilling one vision teaches us to recognize another ? From this point of view we can appreciate the full meaning of the confessions of ignorance, and refer- ences to some unfathomable reality, which fall so continually from the lips of those who, in these