Article August 12, 1950 ISSUE

WHAT AND WHERE IS REALITY?

FRANKLIN A. DEAN

The search for absolute reality has long engaged the attention of thinkers. Early it was recognized that the ever-changing phenomena of the material universe afforded no evidence of the real and permanent. To discover the real has called forth some of the best intellectual effort of the ages—with only negative results. Philosophy, in its quest for reality, has pushed the capacities of the human mind to their farthest reaches, only to arrive at a dead end.

In his "First Principles" (1888 Printing of Fourth Edition, pp. 68, 69) Herbert Spencer sums up the situation in these words: "The conviction, so reached, that human intelligence is incapable of absolute knowledge, is one that has been slowly gaining ground as civilization has advanced.... All possible conceptions have been tried one by one and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result arrived at being the negative one above stated—that the reality lying behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown. To this conclusion almost every thinker of note has subscribed."

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