Mathematical philosophy, a study of fate and freedom; lectures for educated laymen, by Cassius J. Keyser.

TRUTH AND THE CRITIC'S ART 141
in the layman's sky, yet lacked the requisite patience for
continuous clarity.
Heteronomous, or Anautonomous, Doctrines, True
and False.-Everyone knows that each of the great sub.
jects belonging to the domain of Thought has a more or
less reasoned literature,-often an immense literature, —
of its own. Everyone knows that any such literature,the literature of any such subject,-is composed of a
number of more or less logically organized bodies of
propositions. It is common and convenient, as everyone
knows, to speak of such a body of propositions,-no
matter what the subject,-as a theory or a philosophy or
a science or a doctrine. Let us here employ the term
last mentioned. Everyone knows that in every great
subject such doctrines are not only numerous but that,
by modification of old ones and addition of new ones,
the number is constantly increasing. Together they con.
stitute our more or less reasoned wisdom,-what Clar.
ence Day would call our supersimian wisdom,-about the
world.
1 desire to draw your attention to the fairly obvious
fact that most doctrines,-the vast majority of doctrines
whether true or false,-are not autonomous. Autonomy,
-the quality of being autonomous,-is an ideal; it is an
ideal to which doctrines in every subject, or the builders
of them, do indeed more or less consciously aspire and
to which they slowly, for the most part very slowly, approximate but which they seldom even nearly attain.
When a doctrine does reach (or nearly reach, for it can
not quite reach) the ideal, when it attains close approximation to autonomy, then and, strictly speaking, only
then it has become mathematical; the immense majority
of doctrines are, then, non-mathematical, lacking au