Assumption Not Proof

— A word about Mr. Hardy and his mathematician’s notes, in a recent number of The Atlantic. Does he not see that while he contemns others for inability to see that assumption is not proof, and that truth is many-sided, he is himself guilty of precisely this sort of irrationality ? If truth presents itself in one aspect to the mathematician, and in another to the physicist, why not also in still another to the theologian or the speculative philosopher ? If assumption be not proof, why assume that the physicist’s objects and method are the only ones allowed to reason ? A silver knife will not cut steel, yet steel can be cut. If the physicist is certain that he can reach only a relative knowledge, or a knowledge of the relative only, is it not an unwarrantable assumption in him to deny that I may reach a higher knowledge by another mode of search? If mathematical and physical science and formal logic feel themselves compelled to remain “ neutral ” with regard to many questions which “ our spirit of inquiry cannot escape,” does it follow that other discoverers with other instruments must needs find these questions insoluble ? That absolute knowledge is unattainable simply because certain investigators, employing only certain preferred methods, have not attained to it seems to be assumption of the most wholesale sort.