Would that I had the ability to write with the penetration and the clearness of statement that the [p.101] subject should certainly elicit, upon the strange equanimity with which mankind, in science or in practical life, receives and faces a direct negative or an open contradiction. Perhaps the habit of easy division into positive and negative, the ready resort to dichotomy, explains the mystery; perhaps the fact that negation or opposition is and can only be in kind, that there never is or can be any real change or need of change in a mere negation, is at least an important factor in the case; perhaps, again, the very hopelessness of the dualism, which a flat, unequivocal negation plainly involves, is also to the point; but, beyond all peradventure, we do accept the direct negative with a patience, even an indifference, that may greatly assist our natural conservatism, whether of thought or life, but that on being recognized certainly does arouse our wonder. Good and its opposite evil, true and false, real and unreal, unity and plurality, life and death, the indivisible and the divisible, rest and motion, plenum and vacuum, immaterial and material, actuality and illusion, lawfulness and lawlessness: these and so many other opposites are the common stock-in-trade of our living and thinking, and we accept and use them with a complacency that cannot easily be exaggerated. Yet the negative in each and every one of them holds the future of the universe in the palm of its hand. And the special scientist before his inevitable paradoxes is as conservative and as complacent as the rest of us.