The
word rapidly became popular, and attempts were made to read into it
far more than its inventor implied. For him it was no definite body of
doctrine, no creed in any positive sense. It merely expressed the
attitude he assumed towards all problems on which he regarded the
evidence as insufficient. It was a habit of mind rather than a series
of opinions or beliefs; an intellectual weapon and not materials on
which to exercise the intellect.
Hume had written that "the justest and most plausible objection
against a considerable part of metaphysics was that they are not
properly a science, but arise either from the fruitless efforts of
human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible
to the human understanding, or from the craft of popular
superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair
ground, raise these entangling brambles to cover and protect them." In
these considerations he found reason not for leaving superstition in
possession of its ground, but for making a bold and arduous attack
upon it in its haunts. The great difficulty in the way of carrying the
war into the enemy's own camp was that in those days so-called science
was itself cumbered with many illogical and metaphysical ideas, and
for the first time in the present century the great advances of
physical science, and, in particular, the renewed life poured by
Darwin into the doctrine of evolution, made it possible to bring a new
series of exact arguments against hazy metaphysical dogmas.
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