A NEW step in the unfoldment of truth invariably provokes discussion, and for two reasons. First, it is out of line with the established beliefs and traditions of the schools; and second, it presents a point of view which is unfamiliar and, therefore, not readily grasped by the great majority, because settled convictions and habitual ways of looking at things render it difficult for them to change their point of view at once or to see things in a different light. Our opinions and judgments depend largely on our way of looking at questions. No matter how candid and open our attitude, we shall be sure to find in the declarations of nearly every radically new propaganda more or less that seems, to our sense, mystifying and self-contradictory if we try to interpret these declarations from the old standpoint. Indeed, the very recognition of a new sense or understanding of truth is possible only because of the opening up of a new point of observation. For example, we may well imagine how absurd and inconsistent the Copernican view of the solar system, now universally accepted, must have appeared when first presented to an incredulous world educated for centuries in the belief that the earth was flat and the center of the visible universe. If, then, we would form an intelligent and just estimate of the issues involved in the teaching and practice of Christian Science, we must approach the letter of its statements in the light of the point of view set forth in its premises.
More than a century ago the academic world was agitated by Immanuel Kant's masterly Critique of the ground of human knowledge. His observations established the fact that impressions received through the medium of physical sensation are conditioned by conceptual modes of the human mind, and that we cannot, therefore, by means of the senses become acquainted with "things in themselves." The recognition of this point of view may be said to have marked a distinct epoch in the history of speculative thought—an epoch in which the scholarly world in general is still living. Efficacious as this movement proved in undermining the chief stronghold of philosophical materialism, it nevertheless opened the way to a profound agnosticism, which to-day dominates the religious and scientific institutions of our western world. And, moreover, while the lines of investigation which represent the legitimate outcome of the Kantian revolution have rendered philosophy a lasting service, in a negative way, by emphasizing the limitations of human reason and showing its utter inability to cope with the profoundest problems of being, they have not succeeded in pointing out an avenue by which humanity may acquire a positive understanding of these momentous issues.
Clearly, from the very nature of the case, the efforts of thinkers who recognize no truer point of view than that of human reason must ever prove abortive and unproductive so far as a knowledge of real being is concerned. What are "things in themselves"? What is the "human mind"? A philosophy which dooms human consciousness to the pursuit of phenomenal shadows, while the noumenon or substance of things remains shrouded in unfathomable mystery, exhibits inherent elements of weakness when challenged by the deepest religious sense of mankind — a sense which persistently declares for the knowability of essential truth. The higher human hopes and intuitions have ever been illumined by prophetic gleams of an order of understanding which is capable of dissipating the clouds of ignorance and mystery that overshadow the consciousness of man's purity and perfection.
