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FIRST CLASS OF OBJECTS FOR THE SUBJECT. 59
thought fit to take the slightest notice either of this, or in
deed of any of the other great and important truths which
it has been the aim and labour of my whole life to set
forth, in order to secure them as a lasting possession to
mankind. It does not suit their tastes, or fit into their
notions ;
it leads to no Theology, nor is it even adapted to
drill students for higher State purposes. In short, profes
sional philosophers do not care to learn from me, nor do they
even see how much they might learn from me : that is, all
that their children and their children s children will learn
from me. They prefer to sit down and spin a long meta
physical yarn, each out of his own thoughts, for the benefit
of the public; and no doubt, if fingers are a sufficient
qualification, they have it. How right was Macchiavelli
when he said, as Hesiod 1
before him :
"
There are three
sorts of heads : firstly, those which acquire knowledge of
things and comprehend them by themselves ; secondly,
those which recognise the truth when it is shown them by
others ;
2
nor the other."
and thirdly, those which can do neither the one
One must indeed be forsaken by all the gods, to imagine
that the outer, perceptible world, filling Space in its three
dimensions and moving on in the inexorable flow of Time,
governed at every step by the laws of Causality, which is
without exception, and in all this merely obeying laws we
can indicate before all experience of them that such a
world as this, we say, can have a real, objective existence
outside us, without any agency of our own, and that it can
then have found its way into our heads through bare sen
sation and thus have a second existence within us like the
one outside. For what a miserably poor thing is mere
sensation, after all ! Even in the noblest of our organs it
is nothing but a local, specific feeling, susceptible of some
1
Hesiod, epya, 293.
8
Macchiavelli,
"
II
principe," cap. 22.