Editorial October 31, 1901 Issue

An Age of Dominant Mind

Editor

Under the above heading Mr. Francis. Grierson writes an article in the Westminster Review in which he says: "This is pre-eminently the age of mind, as the past century was the age of matter."

He further says: "It is no exaggeration to say that the discoveries and inventions of the past ten years have made child's play of every known system of philosophy. Never again will any man be able to build up a philosophical system which will stand the assaults of the new science for the space of a single year. No one reads philosophy now, because the simple but amazing facts disclosed during the past five years render the dreams, the speculations, and the guesswork of the past absurd. The little that we now know in a practical way is more than all the philosophers of the past know, from Aristotle to Leibnitz. The absurdity of the old systems may b summed up in the positivism of Auguste Comte, which aimed at hard-and-fast rules of life and conduct, as if such things could ever be in a world in its infancy. Every fresh discovery delivers a blow at the old and fixed formulas; every disclosure of mental power bids defiance to some stereotyped belief. But the most wonderful fact of the present is that we are being ruled by the seeming impossible. Some of the most successful inventors of the present day would have passed for madmen twenty years ago. The so-called dreamers are now the men of action; they are the ones we swear by; they have proved their power and competence, and thinking people turn to them for more miracles of discovery and invention."

There is much truth in these deductions, in their relation ot material philosophy. They are base on the dominance of the human mind, or the human intellect, rather than upon the divine Mind.

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