The experiments of Priestley and of Franklin
farther exemplified the eighteenth-century key to the secrets of the
universe.
The lesson imparted by Newton and Locke and their successors still
remains to be carried out and embodied in the subtler inquiries. The
bearing upon what constitutes a Mystery, and what constitutes
Explanation, or the accounting for appearances, may be expressed thus:--
In the first place, the Understanding can never pass out of its own
experience--its acquired knowledge, whether of body or of mind. What we
obtain by our various sensibilities to the world about us, and by our
self-consciousness, are the foundation, the ABC of everything that we
are capable of knowing. We know colours, and we know sound; we know
pleasure and pain, and the various emotions of wonder, fear, love,
anger. If there be any being endowed with senses different from ours,
with that being we can have no communion. If there be any phenomena that
escape our limited sensibilities, they transcend the possibility of our
knowledge.
It is necessary, however, to take account of the combining or
constructive aptitudes of the mind. We can go a certain length in
putting together our alphabet of sensation and experience into many
various compounds.
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