created a need to found belief on something firmer than a bottomless gullibility of mind.  This book is aimed to meet that need by giving the mind the freedom of new spaces; but before it can even begin to do so, the reader must be brought to see the fallacy of attempting to measure the limits of the possible by that faculty known as common sense.  And by common sense is meant, not the appeal to abstract reason, but to concrete experience.

THE FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE

Common sense had scarce had its laugh at Bell, and its shout of “I told you so!” at poor Langley, when lo! the telephone became the world’s nervous system, and aeroplanes began to multiply like summer flies.  To common sense the alchemist’s dream of transmuting lead into gold seems preposterous, yet in a hundred laboratories radium is breaking down into helium, and the new chemistry bids fair to turn the time-honored jeer at the alchemists completely upside down.  A wife whose mind was oriented in the new direction effectually silenced her husband’s ridicule of what he called her credulity by reminding him that when wireless telegraphy was first suggested he had exclaimed, “Ah, that, you know, is one of the things that is not possible!” He was betrayed by his common sense.

The lessons such things teach us are summed up in the reply of Arago, the great savant, to the wife of Daguerre.  She asked him if he thought her husband was losing his mind because he was trying to make permanent the image in a mirror.  Arago is said to have answered, “He who, outside of pure mathematics, says a thing is impossible, speaks without reason.”

Common sense neither leads nor lags, but is ever limited to the passing moment:  the common knowledge of to-day was the mystery and enchantment of the day before yesterday, and will be the mere commonplace of the day after to-morrow.  If common sense can so little anticipate the ordinary and orderly advancement of human knowledge, it is still less able to take that leap into the dark which is demanded of it now.  The course of wisdom is therefore to place reliance upon reason and intuition, leaving to common sense the task of guiding the routine affairs of life, and guiding these alone.

THE FUNCTION OF SCIENCE

In enlisting the aid of reason in our quest for freedom, we shall be following in the footsteps of mathematicians and theoretical physicists.  In their arduous and unflinching search after truth they have attained to a conception of the background of phenomena of far greater breadth and grandeur than that of the average religionist of to-day.  As a mathematician once remarked to a neo-theosophist, “Your idea of the ether is a more material one than the materialist’s own.”  Science has, however, imposed upon itself its own limitations, and in this connection these should be clearly understood.