PHILOSOPHICAL NONSENSE.
By James H. Waggoner
A PAMPHLET has fallen into my hands on "the human soul" by A. Schuyler, of Republic, Ohio. It opens with a quotation from ARISTOTLE (good authority in such a cause) which says, "If to philosophise be wrong, we must philosophise to manifest the wrong." It is generally supposed that an author endorses the motto of his book; yet we gather from the book that Mr. Schuyler professes to be a Christian, or at least to be a believer of the doctrines of the Bible. The fact seems significant, when we consider the subject on which he writes, that he quotes from a heathen that it is right to do wrong to make the wrong manifest! Cain would stand acquitted on that principle. The quotation, however, is appropriate, and serves to abate our surprise that the writer makes the Bible a mere auxiliary to philosophy. In endeavoring to illustrate the velocity of thought he says: "Light, which has a velocity of one hundred and ninety-two thousand five hundred miles per second, in which time it would pass eight times round the earth, is slow when compared with thought. The merest of the fixed stars are so distant from the earth that it requires three years for light to travel the intervening space; and there are, in all probability, stars as remote that their light has not, since their creation, traversed the vast space that separates us; yet thought can reach them in no perceptible interval of time." This is an absurdity, whether philosophical or not. The terms fast and slow may be applied to light, but not to thought, as light travels, but thought does not. This is shown by the fact that light, in passing to a given point, strikes consecutively all intervening objects; while thought rests upon the point specified without any regard to distance, or to objects intervening. The velocity of light may be computed, and of course it strikes an object near sooner than one far off. But I can think of, or direct the thoughts of another to, the planet Jupiter, as soon as Ohio; yet of the distance of the former I have no conception. Neither words nor figures will convey any just idea of such a distance to my mind. If Mr. S. will take the trouble to make a circle on the blackboard, and experiment on it, he will find that he cannot think round it any faster than he can describe the circle with the motion of his hand. A descent from the regions of philosophical fancies to plain facts will convince him that light, which passes over every inch in regular order of succession, would illuminate many systems like that in which the earth moves while he was thinking across Ohio by sections!