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Still, not upon this real difficulty in our moral judgments would I now lay greatest stress, although it is real enough and important. In yet another way our moral consciousness is at war with itself. In estimating the worth of human conduct, so far as this is determined by its initiation, we are in an almost hopeless tangle. We are more than likely to think of other people as influenced by their environment in what they do, of ourselves as quite original and responsible, as independent of any such influences; or, more fully and more exactly, we are given to referring our own bad deeds to environment, our good deeds to ourselves, while for others we are prompted to do just the reverse, referring their good deeds to environment, their bad deeds to themselves. Such is human nature--not, to be sure, at its best, but common human nature; and even when we escape the foregoing personally invidious distinctions, we still--and this is the main point--treat self and environment as two naturally conflicting, altogether independent sources of conduct. Two different and independent sources of anything, however, can only make for conflict and contradiction. If only our courts of law could judge responsibility either wholly from the determinations of environment or wholly from those of personal will, or again, if only the will and the environment could be seen as not so radically opposed, what a simplification would ensue, and how much freer and more certain justice would be. To venture on a variation of an aphorism, where there's another way there is always a loophole; where there's environment there is always a shifted responsibility; where there's a "free will" there is always a will taken for some unperformed or imperfectly performed deed.

So the double origin of conduct offers a very serious difficulty, which, when it is understood, is not unlike that of the two powers or selves or classes, but even more is to be said in exposure of our moral judgments. Thus we have the confident conceit of freedom, of our own freedom in good or our neighbour's freedom in evil, or in general of man's freedom to act without regard to the determinations from environment, but we have also a strange though possibly a fortunate way of qualifying the very freedom that we claim. We claim freedom only to avow, almost in the same breath, duties and responsibilities. We have the freedom, but only the duties make it worth anything. A startling paradox this, so familiar to us all: "I am free to do all that I ought to do," or, "I am free to carry out certain necessities of my true life." A startling paradox; and, above all, a strange way of escaping the necessities of environment, unless, forsooth, it really opens the door, or supplies a secret door, by which the necessities of environment and the necessities of one's true life can come together? If freedom demands law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, the law of environment so definitely present? Possibly, then, as once before suggested, one contradiction in experience may be the corrective of another, the paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the contradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and environment. In the case, for example, of the disposition to distinguish between one's own acts and another's, with respect to their initiation by will or by environment, to mingle duty and necessity with one's own supposed freedom is equivalent in effect to denying one's neighbour's freedom because of the restraints of his environment. But such considerations, however promising for future reflection upon the conflicts in our moral consciousness, are not of immediate interest. Our doubts may once more find hope in the reflection that the faults of experience may balance themselves, but we have no occasion to abandon our doubting as idle or meaningless. Contradictions that balance each other, errors that are mutually corrective, are still contradictions, are still errors.

So, to reduce our moral judgments, confusion and all, to small compass, we are free, others are not; they are free, we are not; and our freedom is bound by duty, by duty to the moral law, while their freedom, unless a hopeless lawlessness, is bound by the environment and its law. Again, good and evil are each unmixed, and moral acts serve two masters--that is to say, spring from two sources. We may, therefore, still believe in morality--yet how can this be? And freedom--yet how is freedom possible?

But finally, as last to be examined, there is the idea of law, just now brought to attention. This idea is a focus for a good many conflicting views. Witness the familiar argument from the knowledge of law in nature to fatalism, an argument as absurd as it is widespread, for the bare fact that we know the laws of nature really emancipates us from the blind fate to which the argument points. Can knowledge ever mean anything but freedom? Certainly no law can ever be known unless the sphere of its operation accords with the nature of those who have the knowledge. Simply to know is to share in and be at one with whatsoever is known, and the clearer and more cogent or rational the knowledge, the truer and realer is this participation or union. The law we know, then, must have all the meaning and the natural authority of a law of our own enactment, and so must actually have the sanction of our will. Will, I say, cannot help sanctioning knowledge, for knowledge is always true to, because conditioned by, the natural action of the knower. But no such message of freedom, or say of human opportunity in natural necessity, is commonly received by men at large from the evidences of law in nature. Superstitiously they see only fate. Clear knowledge and blind fate!

And this leads to something else, to something also very common, perhaps the reverse of the foregoing. With what an unaccountable delight many of us have accepted naturalistic explanations, for example, of the sun standing still, or of the retreat of the waters of the Red Sea, or of the Immaculate Conception, or of any of the many other marvels in either the Old or the New Testament, and have thought that so our old beliefs are to be preserved. I have myself heard honest and earnest men, even members of an academic community, appeal to parthenogenesis as a fact in nature which would at least make the miracle of Christ's birth scientifically plausible as well as spiritually significant; but such an appeal, besides being, in my opinion, positively irreverent, is as blind religiously as it is ignorant scientifically. Cannot such men appreciate, and cannot all others who do as they do also appreciate the fact that naturalistic explanation of any miracle, if really a genuine explanation, may prove the fact, but must in just so far destroy, I do not say the miraculous, which is indestructible, but the particular miracle?

The lawful miracle, then--lawful, of course, so soon as explained--is one more contradiction in our prevalent notions about law. That it exemplifies, too, a habit of mind which is exercised by us in many directions besides that of interpretation of the arbitrary things of the Bible can hardly need be said. In life generally the arbitrary is peculiarly fond of going to law, sometimes to what is called nature's law, as when revolutionists of all sorts--strikers and radical reformers--raise the cry of "natural rights," laying down the law as to what men are by nature, and sometimes to "human" law, as when the conservatives in government or business with their vested rights, be these coal mines, oil fields, or political privileges, appeal for "justice" to the courts or to the military.

But, to say no more, with the lawful miracle, with law the strange support of what is arbitrary, with this as a very good example of the duplicity which in general we are all of us wont to allow in our practical life, the present exposure of our ordinary consciousness must come to an end. With regard to the real substance of things, or to their unity, or to the nature of space and time and causation, with regard to the worth of knowledge, with regard to our human conduct, to its freedom and responsibility, or finally with regard to the place of law in nature and in the life of man, our ordinary consciousness is manifestly inconsistent and vacillating--nay, is grossly contradictory; and we are led at least to suspect that the disorder which we have found is inherent and essential, having the nature of an original human defect. Such a defect, however, is cause for doubt; so that man, above all "practical" man, having inconsistency or duplicity as almost, if not quite, an uncontrollable habit with him, should be himself a prince of sceptics.

And yet, although we have indeed found man spending at least his waking hours in a room that seems disorder incarnate, and although before the court of practical life the doubter seems thus to have been thoroughly justified, while his too hasty judges are in turn condemned, nevertheless the case for doubt is not of such a character as to leave absolutely no hope for belief. Now and again in the evidence, as it has been disclosed, have we not felt the presence of something, not yet given its due weight, that would make man more than a mere doubter and unbeliever? Have we not been led to suspect that somehow, without loss of their reality and validity, the most cogent reasons for doubt, even the contradictions in our views of things, might turn into bases of belief, that an experience essentially paradoxical may not be as hopeless as at first sight it may appear, that in all the madness there is at least a chance of some method? The view of science, however, must be examined before our attention can be turned definitely upon such a possibility. Enough if in our present doubting we are still left with a little hope.

In the rise of Christian Science, against which I have no special grudge, although I have already taken exceptions to its claims, there is a special case, special because affecting a single, relatively small class, of the popular hospitality to contradiction. Thus, the Christian Scientists would reduce all reality to mind, but at the same time they busily deny reality to a large group of mind facts, namely and notably, the ideas of disease. Recently, it is true, according to the newspapers, their healers have been told to "decline to doctor infectious or contagious diseases," yet not because such diseases have any reality, but because the illusion of them is so real as to make the "Christian" treatment of them both imprudent and impractical. Philosophies and religions of illusion are certainly weird, uncanny things!

THE VIEW OF SCIENCE: ITS RISE AND CHARACTER.

With science we usually associate accuracy and consistency, and at first thought we are not likely to expect that the work and standpoint of science can contain anything substantial enough for the doubter to base his claim upon; but second thought is our first duty at this time, and second thought always changes the view, and in this particular instance it will show science in important respects to be quite as vulnerable as the unreflective consciousness of practical life, for science also is honeycombed with contradiction and paradox.

More than once scientists themselves have turned sceptical about their work and its results. The cry of bankruptcy in science, not merely as a charge, but also as a confession, has been heard in the land not infrequently; now perhaps low and uncertain, but again clear and strong. And why not? Why should the scientist escape the questioning of other men? Subtle and wonderful as science is, does it transcend humanity? Surely, when all is said, the scientific consciousness is not formally different from the ordinary consciousness. The same eye is looking at the same world, only through microscopes and telescopes. The same mind is measuring the same environment, only with carefully devised instruments of precision instead of arm's lengths or stone's throws and rules of thumb. In a word, science is merely the ordinary consciousness highly developed, not without considerable abstraction, into critically conscious method and clearest possible perception. Indeed, perhaps without myself clearly knowing all my reasons, I am constrained to say that science is related to ordinary perception very much as the inventor's consciousness of his wonderful flying-machine to the simple sensations of a bird. The mechanics of flying, so elaborately present to the former, are nevertheless also present in the latter, while with both we have the same eye or the same mind looking and the same world seen. The boasted methods and ideals of the one are but the only half-waking instincts of the other, and whatsoever is essential to either belongs also to the other. But, to mark the great difference between them, the inventor has the disposition to treat flying abstractly--that is, as if a thing by itself, as if for its own sake; and he goes even farther, making abstraction of the mere explanation and mechanical expression of flying; while the bird simply flies, and, if I may hope to be understood, all things else, the sun and the wind, the trees, and all living things, and you and I who follow his course are flying with him.

But no poetic soaring such as this can satisfy our present needs. To understand and appraise the view of science we must trace its rise as clearly as we can, and then critically examine its peculiar conceits, its own ideal methods and attitudes.

As for the rise of the scientific view, we may well return to the definition of science given above: the ordinary consciousness highly developed, not without considerable abstraction, into critically conscious method and clearest possible perception. Perhaps development of anything is always at the cost of abstraction; but be this as it may, science certainly arises through an abstraction, namely, through the abstraction of consciousness of one's world, through the treatment of this mere consciousness as something to be cultivated quite for its own sake; and the motive and the meaning of such a treatment are not far to seek. Consciousness, to the exclusion or inhibition of direct, overt action, becomes a matter for abstract, which is to say, exclusive cultivation, with any serious change, with any upheaval in the familiar conditions of life. A man--or boy, if you prefer--is taking a cross-country run, and for a time all goes well; the manner of his going suffers no interruption, or no serious interruption; but gradually the undergrowth thickens from low bushes to higher brushwood, and at last, perhaps quite suddenly, breaking through some wild hedge, the runner finds himself at the very edge of a stream too wide and too deep for any ordinary crossing. Thereupon his running, or at least his forward running, say the running of his "real life," ceases, and looking takes its place. He is now, in a familiar phrase, "looking before leaping"; yet with his looking there is a good deal of running too, more or less overt, but also more or less instrumental or merely mechanical, as, going from one point to another, he measures the relations of bank to bank, or of possible stepping-stones to each other, or hunts for fallen logs or for shallow places. But, finally, the measurements all made, the peculiar conditions as fully as possible appreciated, in the way found to be most feasible he crosses the stream and runs again. And just in that "looking before leaping," with the accompanying check put upon the forward running and with the change of the "real life" of running into merely instrumental action, we get at least a glimpse of what science is, of the sort of abstraction that its rise implies.

Only science, specifically so called, is more than such a casual, merely personal study of a new situation. Science is the distinct work of a distinct class abstractly studying a new situation that has confronted the progress not of an individual, but of a whole people, and in this character it gets at once all the advantages and all the conceits that belong in general to the life of a class. It gets, too, all the limitations. Science, once more, is not strictly a personal experience, although in personal experience, like that of the cross-country runner, we can get a glimpse of just that which may develop into science. Science is characteristically a profession. The runner withholds his running for a time and merely looks and studies, yet his looking is only for a time; sooner or later he will run again; and even while he studies there is his continued moving about, his instrumental action, as we called it; but the professional scientist waives all thought of possible future activity. Although in reality his looking is before leaping, it is not consciously so for him; he is one who under the constraints of his class merely looks and studies, making of these processes things quite worthy in themselves.

In other words, to enlarge somewhat on what has just been said, the rise of the profession of science does indeed involve both the same check upon the "real life" and the same reduction of activity to a purely mechanical or instrumental character that we have pointed out in the case of the runner at the bank of the stream, but a number of different social classes divides the labour. In general, society as a means to the expression and development of human activity, be the activity running or living in a broader and fuller sense, always shows the different phases or factors of the experience identified more or less exclusively with as many different classes or groups, and, in respect to the particular case here under consideration, upon the rise of science society appears to delegate the work of careful observation and critical thinking to a separate class, which, as already suggested, gives up any direct responsibility to the real life. Another distinct class, arising contemporaneously, is composed of those who do feel directly responsible, or "practical," continuing the life of positive, overt action. This second class maintains the vital processes, although in a more or less consciously instrumental way, since its members have the lives of others as well as their own lives to support. So society gets its workers or labourers as well as its observers and thinkers.

The rise of science, then, involves a disrupted society. Moreover, the division is by no means so simple as the foregoing analysis may seem to have implied. Observing and thinking, for example, have often made, too, separate sub-classes, and also there have been many distinct groups among the workers, such as clerks, soldiers, artisans, road-menders, and tillers of the soil. The simple analysis, however, has been quite enough to show, what has seemed to need emphasis, that all the passions of social life, or rather of social caste, are brought to bear upon the profession of science, giving it the peculiar conceits and advantages of class or caste, and also imposing upon it the peculiar limitations. The advantages, among others, are the strength that lies in union, and the long continuity and the imitation that always ensure an accumulation of experience and a refinement of method and an attainment to impersonal, impartial standards; the conceits are exclusiveness, sense of sanctity or intrinsic worth, and consequent claims to aristocracy; and the limitations, although possibly already quite obvious, are hereafter to be pointed out. But whatever the limitations or the opportunities, it is now our chief concern that the social conditions of its rise must greatly intensify the abstraction of science, the treatment of the consciousness of the world, which is but the sphere of action, the totality of the manifested conditions of action, as something to be cultivated wholly for its own sake.

Plainly a disrupted society, such as has been seen to be incident to the rise of science, means also a disrupted life. In general the corporate life of any single class resulting from the division can be only partial, I do not say in respect to "real life," since this phrase has itself been associated with too narrow a meaning, but to human nature, to human life in its entirety, in its real fulness, in its true breadth and its true depth. All class life, I repeat, involving as it does disruption and selection of some particular interest or relation, is inadequate to any human being, and the life of science is no exception to this rule. Membership in any class and conformity to its peculiar life, which is partial and abstract as partial, have never satisfied anybody, and the life of the professional scientist, again, is no exception to this rule. Accordingly any abstraction in life, the isolation of any specific interest, when seen in just the light of its necessary inadequacy, of its definite, more or less exclusive partiality, must imply in life a demand for reality and completeness, and this the more as the abstraction is assertive, as the isolation is insistent. Simply, the whole life will never brook an untempered neglect from any of its always self-assertive parts. Plainly, however, as plainly as a disrupted society must mean a disrupted life for each resulting group, such a demand can be met only in one way, if the cause for it continues; it can be met only by some form of duplicity, by some way in which, however indirectly, the life of those concerned will always really be more than it seems or will always actually imply what explicitly or formally it appears to exclude. No such narrow life, in short, as must always characterize any social group, can ever be without its compensating innuendoes or indirections for the life from which it is outwardly aloof, and while the peculiar manner in which the true reality and the wholeness of life are thus conserved will very naturally always be determined by the particular class or the particular class-character involved, being of one sort for road-menders and of quite a different sort for scientific observers, the organization of society seems bound at every turn to show that duplicity, compensation as it always is for partiality, is an indispensable condition. Duplicity, whatever may be its own special dangers, is always better, being nearer to reality, than narrowness.

But now, whatever in the life of other classes this duplicity, which conserves the wholeness of life even when formally life is narrow and partial, ought to be called, in the profession of science it often goes under the name of dualism. Seen at different angles, it is now dualism, now objectivism, now agnosticism. In each of these different ways the scientist, quite outdoing or transcending his profession, recognizes a sphere of reality or a sphere of activity, that is beyond that of the knowledge which he makes his special business, and, as is very important to observe, the peculiar manner of his recognition of this sphere, or the peculiar character of his duplicity, is relative to just the abstraction which makes his science what it is. Thus his peculiar duplicity is one of conscious subject and unconscious, external object, of observing man and objective nature, of real knowledge and unknowable reality.

Yet here, before discussing further the relation of dualism to science, it is well to observe that the positive history of science justifies the account of its rise which has now been given. The age of science among the Greeks was coincident with the closing conflict between Greek civilization and the general life of the Mediterranean, and the age of modern science began, not to attempt a long story, with the discovery of America. All "looking before leaping" is transitional or revolutionary, and while, of course, there had been transitions and degrees of scientific inquiry before, the science of the Greeks belongs to that very critical transition from Greece to Rome; and modern science, to the transition, certainly not less critical, from Christendom to--who can say to what? But not only does history show science to arise when there is a stream to cross; also it shows the life of the time, in the first place, to be sharply disintegrated, its different factors being separately and abstractly expressed through as many different social groups, and, in the second place, in each of the groups to be given to double living, to the storm and stress of being one thing and seeming another. Always an age, conspicuously and characteristically scientific, has been an age of clearly developed classes and of a general duplicity in living.

Thus, to give a striking, although possibly too philosophical an illustration of the duplicity, Democritus, the great materialist and atomist, and Plato, the great idealist, were contemporaries and equally were creatures of their day and generation, and their century was the century of great achievements in Greek science. Moreover, as regards the coincident organization of society, we know at least of Plato that he was keenly conscious of the divisions of society into distinct classes. And in very much the same way materialism and idealism, not to mention hedonism and rigorism, or naturalism and supernaturalism, have been inseparately associated with the rise and the successes of modern science. These philosophies, it must be remembered, are always more than so many conflicting "isms." They are, too, more than the special conceits, in theory or in practice, of so many separate social classes or of the great leaders of these classes. In their very differences they are the definite, the "public" expression of a conflict, or division, that inwardly affects every individual member, whatever his class or profession, which the society contains. In the day and generation of Democritus and Plato were there not well-defined parties, manifest in all the different and separately organized phases of life--moral, industrial, political or religious, namely, the parties of the conservatives and the radicals? And were there not also, as typical individual characters, each of them revealing to everybody something present within his own life, the only conventional loyalist and the more truly loyal reformer, as well as the idle or careless transgressor and the coldly calculating traitor? A life so divided and so variously impersonated was certainly teeming with duplicity.

Nor have we yet finished with the evidence from history. An age of science has always been not merely an age with a stream to cross, nor yet merely an age of classes and double living, but also an age of a thoroughly conscious utilitarianism. Whether materialistically or idealistically, all things have been treated and also looked upon as means to some end, not ends in themselves. For the disrupted society all activity has been more or less consciously calculating and instrumental. As we know, the disruption means actual, when not also intentional, division of labour, and surely there never has been division of labour without eventual development of a distinct sense of the various special instruments and activities as utilities rather than things of intrinsic value. For a time, it is true, the several classes and their activities may maintain the semblance of conservatism and independence; but their inevitable duplicity is bound sooner or later to give a consciously conventional or utilitarian character to the conservatism, and just this makes the activity of the people instrumental or only mediately instead of immediately worthy. If, as some are sure to contend, the division of labour always tends to end, and often does end, in the formation of castes, and in consequence the instrumental character of the activities is forgotten, it needs only to be said in reply that an invitation is then given to some outside power to step in and to make use of, instead of just treasuring or hoarding, the developed instruments or utilities. Caste in the organization of society not only induces absolutism at home, but also, and in this way is fully revealed its real but suppressed utilitarianism, invites conquest from abroad. The days of Greek science were, almost notoriously, days of conventionalism and utilitarianism: witness the Sophists and their teaching, and the life which they waited upon for pay; while the surviving conservatism, by which, as cannot be questioned, the life of the time was blind to its own real mission or purpose, made possible and even historically necessary, first, the Macedonian, and then the Roman conquest of Greece. What the Greeks, being too conservative, though utilitarian, failed to make full use of, another people, less hampered by tradition, finally appropriated. And as for the days of modern science, these, so far as unfolded to our view, have not been unlike in kind: witness the Machiavellism, with which they began, and the spirit of commercialism, which has characterized them throughout.

One thing more, too, from the facts of history may have our attention, although possibly this addition is quite unnecessary--the fact, namely, of scepticism coupled always with a hopeful curiosity. A disrupted society, dividing the labour of human life, is as sceptical as it is conventional, and as given to experiment and exploration, which are never without their sense of mystery, and even to conquest, never without its risks, as it is utilitarian. Was it curiosity or mere Hellenic conceit, the sense of adventure or the mere dogmatism of a Greek, that took Alexander abroad with his armies, or that earlier turned the attention of Athens to the possibilities of the West? And which, curiosity or religious and political propagandism, a pagan greed or a Christian piety, inspired the Western and Southern voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Which gave rise even to the Crusades? It would be interesting, if our present purposes only warranted the undertaking, to trace the forerunning conditions of a period of scientific endeavour. We could then show both how scientific curiosity has developed as but one expression of a general interest in experimental endeavour, in adventure and in conquests of all sorts, and especially how this interest, with its mingling of doubt and confident seeking, has been preceded by a period of art. Art, appeal as it always is from the human as expressed in the established ways of some given social organization to the natural, shows a people sensitive to a mystery, a real but unseen end, in its developed activities, but not yet willing to let the experimental and instrumental character of those activities have free expression. It appeals to the natural, which is of course the sphere of all adventure, but, still cherishing the human, it never gets, so to speak, out of sight of home. Science, the successor of art, shows home, that is, the human and the subjective, left far behind. But to follow out the line of thought here suggested would take us too far afield. Let it suffice, then, that we see these two things: how historically and socially the investigations of science, whatever their relations to an antecedent art, such as that of the Greeks or of Christendom in the Renaissance, are but an incident within a general life of appeal to nature--that is, of exploration and conquest--and then how the scepticism, involved in the inquiries of science, is intrinsic to a life that, for reasons now clear to us, has become both conventional and utilitarian, both formal--or unreal in itself--and consciously only instrumental. The first of these brings to mind what was referred to in a previous chapter, that science is man in his doubt seeking the companionship of nature; and the second will aid us greatly in understanding the attitude and method of science, to which, having the evidence of history, we have next to turn.

We have found the rise of science to imply a general abstraction of the various factors in human life, and to be itself, in particular, the abstraction of the consciousness of nature, nature being the totality of the manifest conditions of life. This abstraction has been developed and intensified by the formation of distinct social classes; and, in the special case of the consciousness of nature, by the formation of a class of scientists, so called, who cultivate their science for its own sake. We have found the rise of science to imply also a general duplicity, evident within the field of science in what is known as dualism. Duplicity is a natural accompaniment of all abstraction, and it has, as we saw at least in part, a certain protective and corrective function, which both the logic of experience and the social and historical conditions of its expression and development warranted us in ascribing to it. And, finally, we have found that in actual life abstraction and duplicity make activity conventional and utilitarian, that is to say, consciously instrumental or--let me now say--experimental. In just these conditions, then, the general abstraction and duplicity, the conscious formalism and regard for utility, and the sense of experimentation, we have the determinant, formative influences of science's attitude and method, for any given set of conditions always makes the method with which the conditions themselves are met. Socrates, with his method of cross-questioning so fatal to all ideas that should give knowledge any visible form or resting-place, was but the spirit of his time, the spirit of radical inquiry become incarnate and assertive in public places. He was but a visible, public exponent of the critical examination of life which the self-consciousness of his time made necessary. Indeed, no organic form, no living creature, ever reflected the character of its environment more fully, or more successfully effected an adaptive life than the method, with its searching questions, and its subtle, logical gymnastic, of that honestly and radically inquisitive Sophist. And the standpoint and the procedure of science, in respect to the relation to their environment, are closely comparable with the method of Socrates.

Thus science seeks a complete abstraction of the looking consciousness, and then with a timely duplicity it looks to a wholly external, natural world. So in the field of its peculiar abstraction does science take the character and colour of its surroundings. But, further, it presumes upon the peculiar forms and conditions of its subjective, looking consciousness, the activities of the mind, being mediative or instrumental to the presentation of the external objective world, and it uses also the activities of life at large, both the bread-and-butter activities and the mechanical inventions, both the political and the industrial organizations, as supplementary aids to its observations; for just science, the looking consciousness, is the end, and this end is presumed to justify every available means. So, again, does science take the cue from its environment, expressing in its own way and to its own purposes the general experimentalism; and this the more significantly when we remember that, besides being experimental, treating the mind as an instrument and life's activities at large as only aids more or less directly pertinent to the mind's work, it is agnostic. Its peculiar agnosticism not only reflects its duplicity, as was before suggested, but in addition shows how very abstract its knowledge is, and--I know no better phrase--how timelily adventurous. A time of science is a time when all things final are beyond; yet also, when all things present, however mysteriously, are really leading yonder.

Further, science always divides the field of its operations, and so, besides greatly compounding its abstractness, reflects in its own way, or, as it were, projects on its own plane, what I will call the specialism of the contemporary social organization. There is division of labour in this, but there is also a difficulty, which, among other difficulties, is hereafter to be considered.

And there is, finally, one more characterization of science which is suggested by the conditions of its rise, but by something in those conditions not yet brought into clear view. An age of science is an age of a rising, although perhaps formally suppressed and disguised individualism, and quite in sympathy, the method of science is "inductive," science, though interested in classification, always having regard for the natural rights of particular things, of single individuals, reasoning from the particular to the general, as the phrase runs, not in the reverse order. Individualism has been a much misunderstood thing, be it a social movement or a logical condition of inductive thinking. The individual as person or as objective datum has been greatly abused. But at least for the present, waiving any discussion of the true character of the individual or any protest that the individual and the definite or particular must not be confused, I would only assert, but I venture to assert strongly, first, that behind the conventionalism and utilitarianism of the life of a society divided into distinct classes, behind the abstraction and the inevitable duplicity, behind the sense of experiment and adventure, the individual person is the real power, and secondly, that in induction science has only translated this real individualism of its time into an attitude or method for the conduct of its looking consciousness. In this way, as in those other ways, has science been educated to its peculiar manner.

We have thus seen how science arises, and how its rise gives it a certain character. But already suspicion of limitations in the view of science, and so of a case for doubt with regard to it, has come to us. Abstraction and duplicity both suggest limitations, though these may not be unmixed. What the specific difficulties are, however, and how far they really justify our doubting, must be reserved for the ensuing chapter.

THE VIEW OF SCIENCE: ITS PECULIAR LIMITATIONS.

Limitations or opportunities? Error or truth? In the familiar illustration the tracks which limit the locomotive to a certain course are essential to its successful movement, and something of the same kind may be true of science. A man's vices and virtues are never really far apart, and, again, the same may be true of science. But for the moment we are to approach science from the standpoint of its limitations; we are to see how its own natural ideals, as suggested by our characterization of the scientific view, are evidence of its inadequacy. So doing we shall take a most important step towards a thorough-going confession of doubt.

To the examination, therefore, of these difficulties, or limitations, we must now turn, taking the three ideals in order.

A fruitful science relates itself to something more than a mere independent object. A fruitful science involves synthesis, not formal, but real synthesis, as well as analysis, its decomposed object being also only the separated details of some organizing activity. Indeed, however unconsciously, or even however against its own avowed interest and desire, science has that organizing activity in the real life. The "real life" has seemed aloof, but science is truly an integral part of this life. Science's very genesis in social evolution, in spite of, nay, even because of its abstraction by a distinct class and the assumption of a professional garb, is witness to this relationship. Again, fruitful science is practical invention, not abstract discovery, and the real life of a person or a society or a race is as important to it, as much a warrant of its conclusions, as any object, however mathematically described or describable, with which science was ever concerned. As for the thing invented, the tool or the machine, in general the instrument of adaptation to environment, this sometimes takes visible, wholly material form; sometimes it appears as a method in the practical arts or in the fine arts or in education or government; sometimes it is only an atmosphere or point of view, a habit of mind; but whatever it is, it is useful, incalculably useful, and its invention as something that is widely distinguished from mere receptive observation, if this be even possible, or from mere accurate description, is science's primary justification.

But this, objects somebody, is sentiment, and sentiment of the sort that quite destroys science, making real science, serious and accurate science, quite impossible. Well, it does of course dispense with a purely objective science. It suggests the idea, perhaps the uncomfortable idea, that, as in some other departments in life, so in science, death is a condition of success. Science must die to its objective self before it is saved; it must lose its whole world to gain its own soul. Or, to put the same idea differently, if the assertion be not too much like verbal play, a subjective science is not hopelessly unscientific. Is a man less interested in having a proper edge on his razor because eventually he must use it on himself? Nothing but a keen edge can ever ensure a "velvet shave," and nothing but the truth, the more accurate it be the better, can ever set anybody free.

Still, all questions of sentiment or of sharp razors or of the accuracy that liberates aside, we can get support for our scepticism about a science that, if purely objective, must be also empty and mechanical from science itself. The consistent evolutionist is obliged to deny pure objectivity to any scientific knowledge, just as in general he is obliged to think of all consciousness as never something by itself, but one of the positive conditions of organic development. To be an evolutionist, and at the same time to think of consciousness as only an external ornament of life, or in its higher development as the exclusive privilege of a distinct class, to think of it as an aside in life, perhaps a sudden result without in any way being also a condition of development, to suppose science to be solely objective and for its own sake, is nothing more or less than simply to stultify oneself completely. Even for the historian, whether avowed evolutionist or not, whose great business is to remind us that what is here or what is now is not all, the devotion to science for its own sake, which also in other times has possessed the minds and hearts of certain men, can be at best only a local and a passing phenomenon. Finally, apart from the standpoint of evolution or history, it is to be said that human society at large is sure to resent what may be styled the aristocratic temper which pure, objective science is all too likely to acquire from the exclusiveness of its ritual or technique, or say from its abstract and academic dress, and the resentment of society is important evidence always. Aristocratic temper, whatever its direction, is certainly as desirable in social life as it is necessary; it is incident to the development of all institutions--political, ecclesiastical, industrial, ceremonial, educational, and, to add to the familiar list, epistemological; but the resentment which it is sure to awaken is not one whit less serviceable to society, ensuring as it does, among other things, the extension of science, the translation of science into life.

So, to gather the threads together, two difficulties have now appeared as affecting the objectivism of science. The first, that of burial in technique, gave us our starting-point, and the second has come to light with discussion of the first. Thus, not merely is a would-be objective science, through its bondage to technique, made formal and empty, but also, as perhaps only the other side of the same truth, a would-be objective science materially--that is, for its scientific doctrines--and formally--that is, for its motives and methods--is always in practice dependent upon the demands and sanctions of real life, and so not purely, or not dualistically, objective after all. There is, in brief, no other conclusion. Either science must be empty, a matter merely of dead rites and dry symbols and irrelevant ideas, or it must be pertinent and practical; and, if the latter, its boasted independence is gone. A purely objective science seems to get only subjectivity for its pains.

Yet this conclusion is easily misunderstood. It is far from denying any meaning to such words as object or objectivity. The object is denied only as an external independent existence. The object still remains to experience as possibly of mediative value to its beholders, mediating between the actual in their life and the possible, between the partial life and the whole life, the old and the new, the social, which is always narrow, and the personal. The whole must be always "objective" to the part, the possible to the actual, the personal to the social; or, conversely, the "objective," natural world can be only the convincing witness to the part or to the actual or to the social, not that there is an independent, wholly external world, but that there is a whole or a possible or a personal. "Truly, we are all one," writes Fiona Macleod. "It is a common tongue we speak, though the wave has its own whisper, the wind its own sigh, and the lip of man its word, and the heart of woman its silence." We are all one. Man and nature, which man beholds, or the subject and the object, of which the subject is conscious, are one; but an objective science would hide this from us, not tell it to us.

Possibly this does not mean very much. Then approach the matter from another side, risking a reference to one of science's pet conceits, the "question of fact." It has been for science a question of fact, of mere objective fact, whether matter made mind or mind made matter; whether this or that thing is or is not a cause of some other thing; whether certain very low, perhaps unicellular organisms show purpose in their activities or do not, are gifted with a natural tendency to social life, a real interest in their kind, or are not so gifted; or--to take just one more case--whether the changes in the brain that precede bodily movement are or are not directed by consciousness, consciousness being in one case in causal relation with the brain, and in the other only an idle, external accompaniment, an "epi-phenomenon"; but in each of these questions of objective fact we see the scientist only standing in his own light, obscuring the view of what above all else it is important to see. Are mind and matter, cause and effect, purpose, society, brain-processes and consciousness such well-established conceptions, are they such independent constants in the scientist's formulae, that wholly uncritical questions of fact are all that one needs to ask about them? Why, when one really thinks about it, to assume, as the questions of fact of an objective science are made to assume, that anything either is or is not something else, is about as blinding and ill-advised as could well be. It has the pleasing form of open-mindedness, but only the form. It is very much as if some earnest, yearning truth-seeker should exclaim: "I would see clearly; therefore I will not open my eyes." No doubt it keeps the scientist busy, eternally busy, dealing and redealing his facts or data, as busy indeed as the playful cat that so hotly pursues her own tail, but it does not contribute much that is positive and progressive. The very best that one can say for it is that it turns the kaleidoscope of human experience, leading as it usually does to a new arrangement of hard, unchanging things. To the question, for example, about lower organisms showing purpose or social feeling in their activity, the scientist, after most careful experiments, may answer in the negative, and be quite emphatic in his answer too; but almost at once he--or some one for him--will appreciate that mankind, when scrutinized and experimented upon in the same way, under the same instruments and through the same laboratory methods, is similarly deficient; and then, somehow, the wind is taken out of his sails, since social feeling and purpose refuse to be so easily disposed of. In this case, as in all cases, the question of mere objective fact simply returns, as importunate as ever, for another reckoning, with Shelley's cloud silently laughing at its own cenotaph.

And what is the difficulty? Once more the difficulty is in the assumption, so natural to an objective science, of fixed conceptions. Are purpose and social feeling so fixed in their nature, and above all so well understood, that their presence or absence can be established by an experiment or two or ten thousand conducted on strictly objective principles? No conceptions are fixed, and instead of questions of fact we should have, what a strictly objective science cannot have, questions of meaning. Thus, not: Are low organisms, or any organisms, social or purposive? but: What, if anything, do the processes of their lives testify as to the real nature of society or purpose?

In so many ways, then, a would-be objective science is open to criticism, and affords in consequence a cause for doubt. Only subjectivity can make it fruitfully and worthily scientific. Only a change in the form of its question can make it substantially as well as formally progressive. Only a tempering of its negative answers to a merely relative meaning can make it honest. It is looking at what is not, and in a way which is artificial, and it sees everything only in the clear light of its own shadow. Surely to be scientific is human; to be objective is to rival the lover's unselfishness.

But, secondly, there is the scientist's ideal of specialism, which is at once not less earnestly cherished and not less strikingly at constant war with itself. What specialism for science means is known at least in a general way to everybody, and that an objective science must be made up of numberless independent inquiries needs only mention, since the objective world, if really innocent of all personal or subjective relations, is necessarily manifold and discrete, being made up of a number of wholly separate details, and being approachable in every one of its parts from a number of wholly separate standpoints. The objective world apart from a subject is like a workshop without a workman--a collection of unused and so unconnected tools and materials each one of which may have an infinite number of uses; and the objective scientist views it very much as a stranger, perhaps a savage--may I be forgiven that mark--might view the lifeless shop, seeing now this thing, now that, but never the living unity of all the things. So, to repeat, as soon as the self or subject is removed and the world is turned objective, all things and all views of things must fall apart, and science as the observation of such a world can be only "special." Not so clear, however, or at least not so commonly appreciated, is the peculiar fallacy and contradiction of specialism to which attention is asked here. Once more is science to be seen as in a sense standing in its own light, since it cannot be at once special and directly and literally true and adequate.

To begin with, specialism makes vision, the mind's vision as well as the sensuous vision, dim or distorted. It may even be said to induce a species of blindness or, as virtually the same thing, to create in consciousness curious fancies, strange perversions of reality, seen not with the natural eye at all, but with the imagination, always so ingenious and so original, and one might almost add so hypnotic, in its power of suggestion over the senses. In ways and for reasons neither unknown nor unappreciated by most men, specialism even closes one's eyes and makes one dream. It makes the specialist among physicians see his special ailment in every disorder, and every disorder in his special ailment, and this so truly that merely to consult him may be to fall his victim. True, he may never be, perhaps can never be, wholly wrong, and his transgressions, conscious or unconscious, have often helped discovery, but nevertheless his situation, not to say that of his patient, is full of humour, and always among other troubles he is under the error of partiality or one-sidedness. And in science generally the specialist always does and always must dream. His dreams may be waking dreams, but he is always transgressing his own proper bounds without ever clearly comprehending that he has transgressed. Nor, be it admitted, can this necessity of dreaming be a wholly unmixed evil to science. However unfavourably it may reflect on the final, literal validity of any special science, it only shows nature, or reality, preserving her unity against the attempted violence of specialism. It shows that in spite of the specialist being all eyes for his own peculiar object, the mind that is within him and that is above all else--such, apparently, is the nature of mind--responsible not exclusively to the special and sensuous, but to the all-inclusive and essential, and is therefore bound to conserve for experience the interests of an indivisible universe in every particular thing, leads him, devotee that he is, patiently repeating his sacred syllable, into most wonderful visions. For the sake of inclusiveness and reality his mind projects his would-be special consciousness into regions of strange subtlety and marvellous logical construction; as Oriental priest or Occidental scientist he is a specialist, yet not without a mind, or a real, ever-present world, which refuses to be special, and as he dreams he comes to see, yet knows not that he sees, the whole universe. A seeing blindness, then, is this specialism; a monomania too, but, of course, conventional and respectable.

Physiological psychology and physically experimental psychology, both of them suggestive of nothing less incongruous than seething ice, are sure to come to mind at once; but also there is a mathematical psychology, comparable with a developmental mechanics and biometrics in biology, and hardly a single field of science, however apparently distant and alien in nature and interest, has not contributed something to psychology or to epistemology, the general science of knowledge. But now it is likely to be objected by some one that just because sciences, whether in clearly related or in widely separated fields, are useful to each other, just because they can serve, as they do, in the r?le of methods of each other, they are not necessarily in any real and natural affinity. May not their association be purely one of utility, involving no surrender of special individuality and requiring in any case only temporary relationship? The question is absurd. Any means that really serves an end must have something in common with the end it serves; and, again, an end that really sanctions a means, whatever the means be, must itself be, at least potentially, which is after all to say essentially, in and of the means employed. Different sciences, then, even physics and psychology, or natural science and theology, cannot be even temporarily methods of each other without partaking in some way, under some disguise or other, through some peculiarity in their conceptions or in the relations of their conceptions, of each other's subject-matter.

O wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion.

Only the bonnie Robert himself was too much of a specialist in poetry to see that natural science was the very thing he prayed for.

And just as there is thus a physical psychology, so in like manner there is a psychological or epistemological physics, which in its turn is concerned with the indirections, or doors in the panelling, present in all the psychical sciences, for those very physical things quantity and matter. The devil will have his due; even an optimistic theology has to recognize him. And psychology has a sensuous self, the self of the purely sensuous consciousness, which has always involved it in a curious psychical atomism, a projection, in a word, of the physical on the plane of the psychical. Sensationalism, too, as a psychological theory in the history of thought has always been associated with materialism.

For other evidence against the integrity and adequacy of specialism, showing how mind defies specialism and conserves its indivisible universe, there are the following simple but certainly interesting facts. All the different sciences, however special and however apparently alien in subject matter, are wont to use the same general methods--as, for example, the laboratory or experimental method or the historical method, the fatal consequences of which to the cause of pure specialism may easily be inferred. History is famous for overcoming differences. The common interest in mathematics must also be mentioned, for mathematics, through its latest developments in danger of turning into a pure logic, is quite independent of all those material differences that separate the different sciences. It is formal and universal, not special; so that the special science that would also be mathematical appears somehow to be at least in aim as universal as it is special. Perhaps mathematics more than anything else has fed the voracity which we have seen veracity to exact. Has it not been the chief agent in the virtual annihilation of the barriers between physics and chemistry? This particular mingling of the special sciences has been mentioned here already, but mathematics is threatening the party-walls of all the other sciences also. Further, what are we to infer from the idea that all sciences seek law? Certainly law is not special as science has seemed to be. Somehow law is not many, but one. Many laws can only be different phases or cases of one law. The very essence of law is to be one and single and all-embracing. To put the case theologically, could any one suppose that God made the laws of chemistry and sociology and psychology as so many separate and independent enactments? On such a supposition he had been a strange God indeed, lacking the very thing, unity of being and character, which men have come to associate with divinity, and what theology demands of God, science, even against its own specialism, must demand of its object. Again, the way in which by implication, when not openly, one science is given to handing over its hardest problems to another is very instructive as well as amusing. Not many years ago I was present at a joint meeting, a good-natured and doubtless honestly ambitious conference of biologists, physiologists, and psychologists, and the addresses then made have often reminded me of one of Thomas Nast's famous cartoons: A closed ring of political grafters, none other than the notorious Tweed and his followers, each pointing to his neighbour and putting on him the responsibility of a very embarrassing situation. "Find the rogue" was the artist's inscription; but with apologies for the association, we can easily change it to "Find the special science." And, lastly, in this list of the simple evidences against an adequate specialism there are the conspicuous analogies other than those of common method or common interest in law, which are always easily traced among the sciences, even the sciences in the opposite camps of matter and mind, of any particular time. Atomism in physics is contemporary with atomism in psychology and with individualism in political philosophy; a monarchical politics with an anthropomorphic, creationalistic theology and an also monarchical physically centred astronomy, whether heliocentric or geocentric; and a Newtonian astronomy, which really makes a law or force instead of an individual body the centre and control of the solar system, with democracy or constitutionalism, and with inductive instead of deductive logic and naturalistic instead of dogmatic theology; so that at no time, whatever the scientist's special interest, whatever his special syllable, can he fail to have at least a formal sympathy with others. Such analogies among the sciences, so often recognized and so absorbingly interesting to the students of the history of thought, if not exactly doors in the panelling, may be said to make the panelled partitions at least translucent if not unsubstantial and transparent.

But the most important fact in illustration of our case against specialism is yet to be considered, and unfortunately it takes us where to some the waters may seem dangerously deep. Not only for reasons already given and emphasized is the special science a misnomer, a contradiction in terms, except in so far as specialism be taken merely as an incident, not without its humour, of scientific method, but also for the same reasons every special science must sooner or later develop its doctrines either into direct paradoxes or into tenets that oppose and contradict each other. Thus, as has been shown, specialism in science is itself a paradox, and, as now asserted, every special science assuming precise form and real validity becomes a home of paradoxical or contradictory doctrines. Indeed, these doctrines just through their opposition appear be the most effective agents of that compensation for neglected points of view, or conservation of all points of view, which we are insisting is for ever forced upon the scientific specialist. In the cases of physical epistemology and epistemological physics we have already seen doctrines working to this end. In those cases the real treachery to the avowed standpoints lay in virtual when not open contradiction. And, for the general principles, is it not quite clear that nothing so surely as contradiction in any given point of view, or in the specific doctrines developed under it, can serve the interests of any other points of view? I have heard it said, but by whom originally I do not know, that a paradox or contradiction was only the mind on tiptoe struggling to look over a very high wall.

The point is just this. The special science, because special or partial and because at the same time courting scientific character or validity, that is, conformity with reality, must be relative, formal, abstract, artificial, unreal, but also for exactly the same reason it must contrive to admit to its conceptions other view-points than its own. Its own peculiar view-point is relative, but that it may attain actual validity it is bound to overcome its relativity by admitting, secretly perhaps yet not less truly, other points of view; and paradox or contradiction is the natural door for such admissions, the original view-point being tenacious to the last. Physics says: "I will be physics through thick and thin; I will be physics though the heavens fall and though dreadful paradoxes arise"; and in like manner psychology cries aloud: "I will be psychology though I suffer from a splitting dualism for my pains." Have you, gentle reader, never held and held and held to some particular notion about things, modifying the details perhaps little by little, but always imagining yourself strictly loyal to the old, old view, and then suddenly discovered your consciousness alive with contradictions? If you have, you know, possibly too well, the natural history of every special science, and also you can sympathize deeply with the hen and her cherished chicks that proved ugly ducklings. The special science, I repeat, must be hospitable, however grudgingly, to strangers, though at the expense of becoming thoroughly divided against itself. Such hospitality is an obligation--call it logical if you will, or moral or metaphysical, for the name matters not if it only suggests coercion--which is not less binding upon the scientific spirit than upon the spirit of racial unity, always urgently present in you and me. You and I may be so special or exclusive as to drive strangers from our doors, but an impulse to call them back and give them entertainment always follows--an impulse that is only the necessary reaction of the expulsion. Humanity is indivisible in spite of our asserted exclusiveness, and nature is indivisible, too, in spite of specialism. Partiality of any sort, along any line, in any field, can never long persist without, though often darkly and indirectly, though by the way of bold, unrecognized, or unconfessed paradox, receiving from outside all that it would exclude. I am not merely repeating. At first, we saw only that the scientific imagination brought to the special science as its working hypotheses certain conserving or compensating conceptions; then, that these conceptions involved treachery to the science that harboured them; but now we are face to face with the fact that their complete, their most effective form is the paradox.

Would that I had the ability to write with the penetration and the clearness of statement that the 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.

But it is one thing to say, or even to reason out cogently and satisfactorily in every way, that the special science, if both persistently special and honestly scientific, must be sooner or later inwardly contradictory and treacherous to itself, and it is quite another thing to show the contradiction in actual cases. The actual cases, however, are more easily found than many are likely to suppose, and at mention they may even seem like forgotten memories, like things which at some time we have noticed but become callous towards. Thus the atom is through and through a self-contradiction, being itself only a part of a divided reality, yet at the same time itself real only because indivisible; and a science harbouring such an atom can hardly be said to be unmixedly physical. The vibration, too, already referred to here as motion in poise or at rest; infinity as one more quantity that is significant because not quantitative; the sensation, a component element of consciousness that cannot possibly be composite; the plenal physical medium, which can be physical only if displaceable by other material things, and so plenal only if not physical, and which has served besides as an immobile yet infinitely elastic basis of motion or its transmission; and, to give just one more instance, in moral and political science the person, a self-existent, actively free being or entity whose every deed as well as whose every thought is responsible to something, being adaptive and therefore social, social with other persons and with nature, and whose every virtue implies dependence and an existence shared with something else: these are all also self-contradictions. And in view of them who must not see how the special sciences are always more than special, ever correcting in ways that may be unappreciated by themselves their partiality of view, ever responsible to the totality of things even while they would observe things only under selected view-points. Such contradictions, once more, show mind loyal to what students of logic are familiar with as the "universe of discourse." Even in science you cannot discourse about anything without at least implicitly discoursing about everything, although in order to do so you must speak in such paradoxes as the atom, the person, the biologist's "vital unit," the vibration, the plenum, and the like indefinitely.

So we may return to the assertion that in its specialism, as well as in its demand for objective knowledge, science is self-contradictory, and with this conclusion established the exposure of science already offers a very strong case for the doubter. Yet it does this only to the extent and in the sense that contradiction warrants doubt. After all is said, have we been only exposing science? Has attack been our only procedure? Do we not find, as we reflect, that in our exposure there has also been something very near to defence? Or, once more, through the science to which we have taken exception have we not seen a science in which we could believe? In the examination of science's objectivism we saw that technique buried science, but--though we did not say this in so many words--that there might be a resurrection. If fruitful in inventions serviceable to life, science was justified in spite of its cultivated objectivism, and the objectivity itself, besides an aid to accuracy, has further significance as possibly an earnest of wider social relationship, of broader and deeper life. The question of fact, too, if appreciated and so made subordinate to the question of meaning, was even allowed, and science, although at once formally conservative and materially negative and destructive, seemed after all to be the promise, so to speak, of a new dawn for the very things denied. And now in what has been said of the specialism of science, the same turning of the edge of attack is all but manifest. Every special science is narrow and relative--it is in the form of an unreal dream; but reality somehow gives form to the dream, for there are always the compensating conceptions. The contradictions by which the compensation has been effected are, then, interpretable not more as causes of doubting science than as reasons for confidence in it. Thus, to be tedious again, the special science is relative and formal; it is a peculiar system of ingenious abstractions that in so far are also errors; but its formal character includes also contradiction; its errors are so related as to correct and balance each other; so that, even in the face of our necessary scepticism about it, science has been evident to us, as also was the consciousness of ordinary life, as somehow always building better than it knows or than its methods or ideals and doctrines viewed only from without would lead one to expect. Moving in it we have certainly felt the presence of, something, not yet called by name, which is very like a principle or power of validity, preserving the reality of things even in and through the relativity and contradiction under which the things are seen. While the letter of our knowledge, even of our scientific knowledge, must ever have an indeterminate future; while rest or stability, ultimate reality or consistency is quite impossible to it, still its inner, active spirit seems a source of faith that is inviolable, that cannot be shaken. Different quantities, such as four and two, and sixteen and eight, do not make the same sum, much less are they the same digits; but they are in the same ratio, and similarly the truth of science would seem to lie in the ratio, the working together, of the errors of science. Outwardly and materially changing with time and with people, assuming ever new forms and comprising always new doctrines, science nevertheless, as an active force, as a positive resultant, is at least now conceivably always the same and applicable to the same life. Even the Babylonians of an ancient day successfully predicted eclipses, the very errors of their astronomy working together for truth, exactly as the heresies of pagan religion seem to have balanced each other to the preservation and the development of the life which we of the present day and the Christian civilization are pleased to call our own.

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