This superstition, for the tenacious vitality of which the idealistic philosophers who are, more or less, disciples of Plato and the theologians who have been influenced by them, are responsible, assumes that matter is something, not merely inert and perishable, but essentially base and evil-natured, if not actively antagonistic to, at least a negative dead-weight upon, the good. CLXVI Judging by contemporary literature, there are numbers of highly cultivated and indeed superior persons to whom the material world is altogether contemptible; who can see nothing in a handful of garden soil, or a rusty nail, but types of the passive and the corruptible. To modern science, these assumptions are as much out of date as the equally venerable errors, that the sun goes round the earth every four-and-twenty hours, or that water is an elementary body. The handful of soil is a factory thronged with swarms of busy workers; the rusty nail is an aggregation of millions of particles, moving with inconceivable velocity in a dance of infinite complexity yet perfect measure; harmonic with like performances throughout the solar system. If there is good ground for any conclusion, there is such for the belief that the substance of these particles has existed and will exist, that the energy which stirs them has persisted and will persist, without assignable limit, either in the past or the future. Surely, as Heracleitus said of his kitchen with its pots and pans, "Here also are the gods." Little as we have, even yet, learned of the material universe, that little makes for the belief that it is a system of unbroken order and perfect symmetry, of which the form incessantly changes, while the substance and the energy are imperishable. CLXVII Of all the dangerous mental habits, that which schoolboys call "cocksureness" is probably the most perilous; and the inestimable value of metaphysical discipline is that it furnishes an effectual counterpoise to this evil proclivity. Whoso has mastered the elements of philosophy knows that the attribute of unquestionable certainty appertains only to the existence of a state of consciousness so long as it exists; all other beliefs are mere probabilities of a higher or lower order. Sound metaphysic is an amulet which renders its possessor proof alike against the poison of superstition and the counter-poison of shallow negation; by showing that the affirmations of the former and the denials of the latter alike deal with matters about which, for lack of evidence, nothing can be either affirmed or denied. CLXVIII