Introduction to science

GIFT OF
PROFESSOR F. L. GRIFFIN

UNIVERSITY FARM

/,

A complete classified list of the volumes of THE
HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY already published will
be found at the back of this book.

INTRODUCTION
TO SCIENCE

BY

J. ARTHUR THOMSON

HEG/t/S PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY, ABERDEEN

UNIVERSITY

OF "DARWINISM AND HUMAN LIFE;" "HEREDITY;"

THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEASONS ; " " HERBERT SPENCER ; "

"THE SCIENCE OF LIFE ; " UTHE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE

IN THE CENTURY; " " THE STUDY OF ANIMAL LIFE;"

" OUTLINES OF ZOOLOGY J " " THE NATURAL

HISTORY OF THE YEAR"

Joint author of ft The Evolution of Sex " and " Evolution"

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

SITY OF CATJFORNIA

LIBRARY

COPYRIGHT, 1911,

BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 7

II THE AIM OF SCIENCE 35

III SCIENTIFIC METHOD 57

IV CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES 81

V SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 124

VI SCIENCE AND ART 166

VII SCIENCE AND RELIGION 192

VIII THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 224

REFERENCES TO BOOKS , 251

INDEX . . 255

INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

CHAPTER I

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD

"For myself I found that I was fitted for noth-
ing so well as for the study of Truth; as having
a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the
resemblance of things (which is the chief point),
and at the same time steady enough to fix and
distinguish their subtler differences; as being
gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to
doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert,
readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and
set in order; and as being a man that neither
affects what is new nor admires what is old, and
that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought
my nature had a kind of familiarity and relation-
ship with Truth." — FRANCIS BACON.

Before Science — The Practical Mood — The Emotional Mood
— The Scientific Mood contrasted with the Others — Ad-
justment of Moods — Characteristics of the Scientific Mood
— A Passion for Facts — Cautiousness of Statement — Clear-
ness of Vision — Sense of the Inter-relatedness of Things —
Culture of the Scientific Mood — Summary.

BEFORE SCIENCE. — We do not know much that
is quite certain in regard to our early ancestors,
7

8 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

but it is safe to say that man's relations with
Nature were for a long time predominantly
practical. We may recall the vivid picture which
^Eschylus gives of primitive men — living in caves,
without fire, without wood-work, without sys-
tem, without seasons, without foresight, a dream-
life without science: —

"And let me tell you, not as taunting men,
But teaching you the intention of my gifts
How, first, beholding they beheld in vain,
And, hearing, heard not, but like shapes in

dreams,
Mixed all things wildly down the tedious

time,

Nor knew to build a house against the sun
With wicketed sides, nor any wood-work knew
But lived like silly ants, beneath the ground,
In hollow caves unsunned. There came to

them

No steadfast sign of winter, nor of spring
Flower-perfumed, nor of summer full of fruit,
But blindly and lawlessly they did all things,
Until I taught them how the stars do rise
And set in mystery, and devised for them
Number, the inducer of philosophies,
The synthesis of letters, and besides
The artificer of all things, Memory
That sweet muse-mother. "

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 9

In those early days the various moods that
we are familiar with — such as the scientific, the
artistic, and the philosophic — had not become
defined off from an oppressive practical mood.
Very gradually, however, Man got a firmer foot-
hold in the struggle for existence, and was able
to raise his head and look at the stars. He dis-
covered the year with its marvellous object-lesson
of recurrent sequences — a discovery which was
one of the first great steps towards science, and
he became vividly aware that his race had a
history. He had time, too, for a conscious en-
joyment of Nature, which came to mean more
and more to him. Here and there, perhaps, some
began to ponder over the significance of their
experience. Gradually, at all events, as the ages
passed, various moods became, as we say, dif-
ferentiated from one another, and men began to
be contrasted according as this or that mood was
more habitual with them. Men of action, men
of feeling, and men of thought, these were the
three primary types, which are now-a-days split
up into minor types. They correspond, obvi-
ously, to doing, feeling, and knowing; to hand,
heart, and head; to practice, emotional activity,
and intellectual inquiry. That we may better
understand the scientific mood, let us consider for
a little the others.

THE PRACTICAL MOOD. — First there is the

10 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

mood of the dominantly practical man, whose
whole trend is towards doing, not towards know-
ing. He must, of course, know his facts if his
doings are to be effective, and he must, likewise,
have sound social feeling if his doings are to be
deeds, not misdeeds; and no one will seek to
dispute that the practical man has a firm grip
of facts, and that he is often full of that kindli-
ness which marks a strong development of the
kin-instinct. Yet he himself would be the first
to point out that he had no particular hunger or
thirst after the descriptive formulae which Science
seeks to supply. So far as Science means that
kind of knowledge which is Foresight, that kind
of Foresight which is Power, he believed in it,
but on the whole it did not interest him. Simi-
larly, while he would confess to a pleasure in
friendly relations between man and man, and
between man and his beasts, and to a sometimes
apparently hypersesthetic sense of order, he would
admit, on the whole, that aesthetic emotion was
not much in his line. He was not built that way.
There is obviously much to be said for the
dominant practical mood. It is as natural and
necessary and dignified as any other. Science
grew out of practical lore, and fresh vigour has
often come to science by a tightening of its touch
with the business of everyday life. How much
mathematics, for instance, both simple and subtle,

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 11

has arisen in direct response to practical needs,
whether of measuring land or measuring elec-
tricity!

On the other hand, the risks of a tyrannous
practical mood are great. When things get into
the saddle and override ideas and ideals and all
good feeling, when the multiplication of loaves
and fishes becomes the only problem in the world,
we know the results to be vicious. To be wholly
practical is to grub for edible roots and see no
flowers upon the earth, no stars overhead. The
exaggeratedly practical man "will have nothing
to do with sentiment," though he prides himself
in keeping close to "the facts"; he cannot abide
"theory," though he is himself imbued with a
quaint Martin Tupperism which gives a false sim-
plicity to the problems of life; he will live, he in-
sists, in "the real world," and yet he often hugs
close to himself the most unreal of ideals.

THE EMOTIONAL MOOD. — Secondly, there is the
emotional and artistic mood, which finds expres-
sion in Schiller's words: "O wunderschon ist
Gottes Erde, und schon auf ihr ein Mensch zu
sein." "Oh wondrous beautiful is God's earth,
and good it is to be Sk man upon it."

From man's first emergence, perhaps, the
herbs and the trees, the birds and the beasts, sent
tendrils into his heart, claiming and finding kin-
ship. Ever so early there must have been a

12 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

rude joy in the heavens and the earth, and in
the pageant of the seasons — something more
than the pleasure of basking in the sun like a
lizard. Probably, however, it was not until man
had gained some firmness of footing in the
world, secured by his wits against stronger rivals
and a careless environment, that the emotional
tone grew into dignity as a distinct mood, a
genuine enjoyment of beautiful things, which
found expression in music and dance, in song and
story, in painting and carving, and in religious
rites.

Like the practical mood, so the emotional
mood has its obvious virtues. It is part of the
salt of life. It begets a sympathy that is insight.
In a noisy world it helps to keep us aware of
harmony hidden in the heart of things.

We are perhaps apt to think too lightly of the
value of the more primitive aesthetic emotions.
Do we not need some infusion of the simple de-
light in the earth which was expressed for in-
stance by Matthew Arnold in his Empedocles on
Etna: "Is it so small a thing to have enjoy 'd
the sun?" There is a fine ideal, which no science
need contradict, in that line of Goldsmith's,
"His heaven commences ere the world be past."
It is only by the culture of the emotional mood —
though the words are almost self-contradictory—
that man "hitches his wagon to the stars."

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 13

But, just as with any other disproportionate
development, there are risks in the hypertrophied
emotional mood. Uncurbed by science, un-
related to practice, it may become morbid, even
mad. Rational wonder may degenerate into "a
caterwauling about Nature." Enthusiasm for
what is beautiful, without relevant activity, may
become an unpleasant effervescence. There may
be overfeeling, just as there may be overdoing.

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD CONTRASTED WITH THE
OTHERS. — The scientific worker has elected pri-
marily to know, not do. He does not directly seek,
like the practical man, to realize the ideal of
exploiting nature and controlling life — though he
makes this more possible; he seeks rather to
idealize — to conceptualize — the real, or at least
those aspects of reality that are available in his
experience. He thinks more of lucidity and
formulae than of loaves and fishes. He is more
concerned with knowing Nature than with en-
joying her. His main intention is to describe
the sequences in Nature in the simplest possible
formulae, to make a working thought-model of
the known world. He would make the world
translucent, not that emotion may catch the
glimmer of the indefinable light that shines
through, but for other reasons — because of his
inborn inquisitiveness, because of his dislike of
obscurities, because of his craving for a system —

14 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

an intellectual system in which phenomena are
at least provisionally unified.

And, as we have indicated the vices of an exag-
gerated emotional mood and of a too exclusively
practical mood, so we must admit that the
hypertrophied scientific mood has its risks, — of
ranking science first, and life second (as if science
were not, after all, for the evolution of life); of
ignoring good feeling (as if knowledge could not
be bought at too high a price); of pedantry (as
if science were merely a "preserve" for the ex-
pert intellectual sportsman, and not also an
education for the citizen); of disproportionate
analysis — dissecting more than it reconstructs —
so that the artistic perception of unity and har-
mony is lost; of maniacal muck-raking for items
of fact (as if facts alone constituted a science).

ADJUSTMENT OF MOODS. — Before we go on to
consider the characteristics of the scientific mood
in greater detail, let us sum up so far. There are
three dominant moods in man — practical, emo-
tional, and scientific — each with its subdivisions.
They correspond symbolically to hand, heart, and
head, and they are all equally necessary and
worthy. "And the eye cannot say unto the
hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head
to the feet, I have no need of you." They are
all worthy, but most so when they respect one
another as equally justifiable outlooks on nature,

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 15

and when they are combined, in adjusted pro-
portions, in a full human life. But that is so
difficult of attainment, especially when great
excellence in one direction has been inherited or
acquired, that the disproportionate developments
we have spoken of are apt to occur. They are
often the more dangerous because of the very
strength which the exaggeration gives to its pos-
sessor. This is part of the penalty of genius.

For ordinary folk, however, it is safe to say
that when any mood becomes so dominant that
the validity of the others is denied or ignored,
the results are likely to be tainted with some vice
— some inhumanity, some sentimentalism, some
pedantry, some violence to the unity of life. A
sane life implies a practical recognition of the
trinity of knowing, feeling, and doing. This
spells health, wholeness, holiness, as Edward
Carpenter has well said.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD. —
In his presidential address to the British Associa-
tion in 1899, Sir Michael Foster inquired into the
qualities that distinguish the scientific worker,
and came to the conclusion that they were, in the
main, three: —

"In the first place, above all other things, his
nature must be one which vibrates in unison
with that of which he is in search; the seeker
after truth must himself be truthful, truthful with

16 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the truthfulness of nature; which is far more
imperious, far more exacting than that which
man sometimes calls truthfulness.

"In the second place, he must be alert of mind.
Nature is ever making signs to us, she is ever
whispering to us the beginnings of her secrets;
the scientific man must be ever on the watch,
ready at once to lay hold of Nature's hint, how-
ever small, to listen to her whisper, however
low.

"In the third place, scientific inquiry, though
it be pre-eminently an intellectual effort, has
need of the moral quality of courage — not so much
the courage which helps a man to face a sudden
difficulty as the courage of steadfast endurance."

Anticipating the obvious criticism that these
three qualities of truthfulness, alertness, and
courage are not in any way peculiar to the scien-
tific man, but "may be recognized as belonging to
almost every one who has commanded or deserved
success, whatever may have been his walk in life,"
Sir Michael said: "That is exactly what I would
desire to insist, that the men of science have no
peculiar virtues, no special powers. They are
ordinary men, their characters are common, even
commonplace. Science, as Huxley said, is or-
ganized common-sense, and men of science are
common men, drilled in the ways of common-
sense."

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 17

Perhaps this protests a little too much, that
the scientific man is as other men are, but it
emphasizes a useful point, that the scientific mood
does not necessarily imply any particular knowl-
edge of this or that science. Some men who are
quite ignorant of any of the concrete sciences
have nevertheless a highly developed scientific
mood. Give them data and a clearly stated
problem, and they soon show that they are
scientific in every fibre of their mind. It is
indeed a vulgar error that science is anything by
itself. To speak of "going in for science" is like
proposing to go in for breathing or good digestion.

When all is said, however, we feel that there is
something distinctive in the scientific mood, and
this requires further analysis. It will appear
that our conclusions agree with Sir Michael
Foster's, but they emphasize intellectual rather
than moral features.

A PASSION FOR FACTS. — As a first characteristic
of the scientific mood we would rank a passion,
for facts, which corresponds to the quality of
truthfulness in Sir Michael Foster's analysis.
It is the desire for accuracy of observation and
precision of statement. "First make sure of the
facts," is a fundamental precept in science, but;
it is no easy matter. Even in regard to simple
problems it is often difficult to get a grip of the
facts of the case. Even in regard to simple oc-

18 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

enrrences it is often difficult to give a quite
accurate account of what took place. This is
partly due to the dash of the artistic mood which
most men have. It is often due to the untrained
©ye, which sees only what it has the power of
seeing, — sometimes little indeed — and, in the
opposite direction, to preconceptions which often
enable men to see what is not to be seen. It is
also due to lack of discipline in the method of
science; thus nothing is commoner than a nar-
ration that mingles observation with unconscious
inferences from observation, which is one of the
elementary fallacies.

I "Man, unscientific man," Sir Michael Foster
said, "is often content with 'the nearly' and 'the
almost/ Nature never is. It is not her way to
call the same, two things which differ, though the
difference may be measured by less than the
thousandth of a milligramme or of a millimetre,
or by any other like standard of minuteness.
And the man who, carrying the ways of the
world into the domain of science, thinks that he
may treat Nature's differences in any other way
than she treats them herself, will find that she
resents his conduct; if he in carelessness or in
disdain overlooks the minute difference which
die holds out to him as a signal to guide him
in his search, the projecting tip, as it were,
of some buried treasure, he is bound to go

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 19

astray, and, the more strenuously he struggles
on, the farther will he find himself from his true
goal."

Many children seem to pass through an inter-
esting stage in which they fail to discriminate
between their dream-pictures and their wide-
awake pictures of actual occurrences, and it was
probably ingenuousness rather than any lack of
good faith that led some of the old naturalist-
travellers, in the glamour of strange lands, to
mix up in their diaries what they actually saw
and what the natives told them was to be seen.
And we do not need to go back to ancient history
to find examples.

The scientific worker is well aware that in
measurements and observations the accuracy at-
tainable is only approximate, and that the degree
of approximation varies with the individual.
The personal equation has been for a long time
frankly recognized and allowed for in astronomy;
it is also sometimes estimated in chemistry and
physics; but it must be recognized all round.
Science begins with measurement and there are
some people who cannot be measurers; and just
as we distinguish carpenters who can work to this
or that fraction of an inch of accuracy, so we
must distinguish ourselves and our acquaint-
ances as able to observe and record to this or
that degree of truthfulness.

SO INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

Hence, naturally, the importance of discipline
and apprenticeship in precision — whether with
the chemical balance or with the scalpel, with
the sextant or the micrometer. Even faithful
drawing is an effective factor in the development
of truthfulness; and we heartily agree with Agassiz
that a training in natural science is one of the best
preparations a man can have for work in any
department of life where accurate carefulness
and adherence to the facts of the case are of
indispensable importance.

Long ago Bacon said: "We should accustom
ourselves to things themselves," and this — to
distinguish between appearance and reality — is
what the scientific mood seeks after. Its emblem
might be the X-rays which penetrate through
superficial obscurities. It is the note of precision
that is distinctive. We read of Clerk Maxwell:
*' Throughout his childhood his constant question
was, "What's the go of that? What does it do?'
Nor was he content with a vague answer, but
would reiterate, 'But what's the particular go
of it?"'

The quality of accuracy has, of course, a great
variety of expressions at many different levels,
but it is of the same mood and towards the same
ideal all through. The discipline of weighing and
measuring is doubtless sometimes exaggerated
into an end in itself, and made unnecessarily

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 21

tedious by its unrelatedness to real problems, but
those who are inclined to be impatient with it
should remember that it is congruent with and
contributory to "that enthusiasm for truth,
that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater
possession than much learning; a nobler gift
than the power of increasing knowledge."

These are Huxley's words, whose passion for
facts marked all he said and did. They suggest
a famous sentence in his autobiography, in which
he expressed his aims in life. "If I may speak
of the objects I have had in view since I began
the ascent of my hillock, they are briefly these:
To promote the increase of natural knowledge
and to forward the application of scientific meth-
ods of investigation to all the problems of life
to the best of my ability, in the conviction which
has grown with my growth and strengthened
with my strength, that there is no alleviation
for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of
thought and of action, and the resolute facing of
the world as it is, when the garment of make-
believe by which pious hands have hidden its
uglier features is stripped off."

We have used the strong phrase "a passion
for facts" because of the intensity which all the
great masters in science have shown in their
reverence for truth and in their contempt for
mere opinions. "Opinions," Glanville says, "are

22 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the rattles of immature intellects, but the ad-
vanced reasons have outgrown them."

"The longer I live," Huxley said, "the more
obvious it is to me that the most sacred act
of a man's life is to say and feel, 'I believe such
and such to be true.' All the greatest rewards
and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling
about that act."

CAUTIOUSNESS OF STATEMENT. — Following from
the passion for facts, there is a second char-
acteristic of the scientific mood, namely, cau-
tiousness. It has habituated itself to withhold
judgment when the data are obviously incom-
plete; to doubt conclusions that have been quickly
reached; to hesitate in accepting what is particu-
larly attractive whether in its simplicity or its
symmetry. Thus scientific workers are naturally
sceptical and of the school of St. Thomas — which
is in no way inconsistent with a tenacity of con-
viction when the demonstration is complete.
Not any easier than accuracy is this quality
of active scepticism, "thatige Skepsis." Indeed,
as Prof. W. K. Brooks says in his Foundations
of Zoology: "The hardest of intellectual virtues
is philosophic doubt, and the mental vice to which
we are most prone is our tendency to believe
that lack of evidence for an opinion is a reason
fo? believing something else." . . . "Suspended
judgment is the greatest triumph of intellectual

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD £3

discipline." The sceptical, distrustful, scientific
desire to test everything was charmingly hit off
in the definition of a professor given in Fliegende
Blatter — "Ein Professor ist ein Mensch der an-
derer Meinung ist." "A professor is a man who
is of a different opinion."

It is true that the scientific mood is continually
making hypotheses or guesses at truth; the
scientific use of the imagination is a recognized
method. It is a kind of intellectual experimenta-
tion, and it suggests actual experiments by
which it is itself tested. The danger of this is
not so much for experts as for those who have
incomplete mastery of the rules of the game, but
every one will admit that provisional hypotheses
have a tendency to put on the garb of full-grown
theories, or even of established doctrines. As
Mr. Bateson has phrased it, the controlled scien-
tific mood will avoid "giving to the ignorant as
a gospel, in the name of science, the rough guesses
of yesterday that to-morrow should forget." As
Huxley said with memorable severity: "The as-
sertion that outstrips the evidence is not only a
blunder but a crime."

A fine illustration of scientific restraint is to
be found in Huxley's agnostic position in regard
to the theory of evolution before the publication
of the Origin of Species. He had studied Lamarck
attentively, and he had fought many and pro-

24 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

longed battles with Herbert Spencer on the
subject. "But even my friend's rare dialectic
skill and copiousness of apt illustration could
not drive me from my agnostic position. I took
my stand upon two grounds: Firstly, that up
to that time, the evidence in favour of transmuta-
tion was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that
no suggestion respecting the causes of transmuta-
tion assumed, which had been made, was in any
way adequate to explain the phenomena. Look-
ing back at, the state of knowledge at that time,
I really do not see that any other conclusion was
justifiable/' . . . "That which we were looking
lor, and could not find, was a hypothesis respect-
ing the orij^in of known organic forms which as-
sumed the operation of no causes but such as
could be proved to be actually at work. We
wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other
speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite
conceptions which could be brought face to face
with facts and have their validity tested. The
Origin provided us with the working hypothesis
we sought." . . . "The only rational course for
those who had no other object than the attain-
ment of truth was to accept * Darwinism' as a
working hypothesis and see what could be made
of it. Either it would prove its capacity to eluci-
date the facts of organic life, or it would break
down under the strain." (See Huxley's Life and

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 25

Letters, vol. i. p. 168.) To read these words is to
breathe the scientific atmosphere. They illus-
trate the scientific mood better than any analysis.
Cautiousness, then, is characteristic of science.
Just as "burnt bairns dread the fire"; so the
scientific mood, often deceived by misobserva-
tion, by inferences mixed up with records, by
hearsay evidence, by an induction from too nar-
row a basis, and even by the will-o'-the-wisp
glamour of a brilliant hypothesis, becomes more
and more cautious, distrustful, "canny." One of
the forms of cautiousness that is most difficult
of attainment, and yet indispensable, is distrust
of our personal bias in forming judgments. Our
interpretations are necessarily coloured by our
personal experience and our social environment;
our hypotheses may arise from social suggestion:
but before they pass into the framework of
science they must be "de-personalized." In fact,
the validity of a scientific conclusion, as distin-
guished from a mere opinion, depends on the
elimination of the subjective element. As Prof.
Karl Pearson says : " The scientific man has above
all things to strive at self-elimination in his
judgments, to provide an argument which is as
true for each individual mind as for his own.
The classification of facts, the recognition of
their sequence and relative significance, is the
function of science, and the habit of forming a

£6 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

judgment upon these facts, unbiassed by personal
feeling, is characteristic of what may be termed
the scientific frame of mind " (Grammar of Science,
1900 edition, p. 6).

As Faraday said: "The world little knows
how many of the thoughts and theories which
have passed through the mind of a scientific
investigator have been crushed in silence and
secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse
examination; that in the most successful instances
not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the
wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been
realized." As a complementary statement we
give another quotation from the same great au-
thority: "The philosopher should be a man will-
ing to listen to every suggestion, but determined
to judge for himself. He should not be biassed
by appearances; have no favourite hypotheses;
be of no school, and in doctrine have no master.
He should not be a respecter of persons, but of
things. Truth should be his primary object. If
to these qualities be added industry, he may
indeed hope to walk within the veil of the Temple
of Nature."

It seems to us strange that some biologists
have criticized Prof. Weismann because in the
course of a quarter of a century or more, he has
modified certain of his suggestions as new facts
came within his knowledge. Nothing is more

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 27

characteristically scientific. As Prof. J. H.
Poynting has admirably put it: "The hypotheses
of science are continually changing. Old hypoth-
eses break down and new ones take their place.
But the classification of known phenomena which
a hypothesis has suggested, and the new discov-
eries of phenomena to which it has led, remain
as positive and permanent additions to natural
knowledge when the hypothesis itself has van-
ished from thought."

CLEARNESS OF VISION. — A third character-
istic of the scientific mood is the endeavour after
clearness, the dislike of blurred vision and ob-
scurities. The mole has a sort of half -finished
lens, which is physically incapable of throwing
any clear image on the retina. If there is any
image at all, it must be a blurred tangle of lines.
In our busy lives, as the nemesis of our specialisms
and pre-occupations, we tend to have moles'
lenses in regard to particular orders of facts; we
see certain things clearly, but others are blurs.
The scientific mood is in continual protest against
this; it is all for clearness.

When we work long at a thing and come to
know it up and down, in and out, through and
through, it becomes in quite a remarkable way
translucent. The botanist can see through his
tree, see wood and bast, cambium and medullary
rays, all in their proper place; he can see the

28 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

ascending water and salts, the descending sugar
and proteids. The zoologist can in the same way
see through the snail on the thorn, seeing as in a
glass model everything in its place, the nerve-
centres, the muscles, the stomach, the beating
heart, the coursing blood, and the filtering kid-
ney. So the human body becomes translucent to
the skilled anatomist, and the globe to a skilled
geographer.

Similarly, on a higher plane than merely opti-
cal clearness, those of the scientific mood are in
great part trying to make the world translucent.
They are seeking to construct an intellectual
cinematograph of the long processions of causes
that pass unceasingly before us. A perfectly clear
working thought-model is what science seeks to
construct.

There is so much to know that ignorance in
itself is no particular reproach; but the point
is to be clear when we know and when we do not,
and it is one of the characteristics of the scientific
mood that it will have yes or no to this question.

"Do you see it or do you not?" was the con-
tinual question of a biological teacher gifted
with great educational ability, and "If you see
it, what is it like?"

A student who worked under Agassiz relates
how she was almost brought to despair by the
severe way in which that great master, after giv-

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 29

ing her a specimen to study, came day after day,
and asked, with a cruel kindliness: "Well, what
do you see now?" and then went away. But
at length the student saw something — saw what
was to be seen, and more also.

What science knows it must know definitely;
what it sees must be in focus. It feels the wisdom
of one of Bacon's aphorisms — often verified in his-
tory: "Truth to emerge sooner from error than
from confusion." The definitizing of error is
often the beginning of its disappearance. When
the evil genie of the Eastern tales took on definite
bodily form there was some chance of tackling
him; as a mere wraith he was unassailable.

One of the expressions of the scientific endea-
vour after clearness is to be found in precision of
speech. Thus Prof. Silvanus P. Thompson says
of Lord Kelvin: "He hated ambiguities of lan-
guage, and statements which mislead by loose-
ness of phrasing. With painful effort he strove
for clarity of expression, elaborating his phrases
in a way that threatened at times to defeat the
end intended. In that hazy medium of words
wherein we all drown, he at least would attempt
to observe the proprieties of language. As an
example take this: Externally the sense of touch,
other than heat, is the same in all cases — it is
a sense of forces, and of places of application of
forces, and of directions of forces."

30 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

SENSE OF THE INTER-RELATEDNESS OF THINGS.
— A fourth characteristic of the scientific mood
is a sense of the inter-relatedness of things. It
regards Nature as a vibrating system most surely
and subtly interconnected. It discloses a world
of inter-relations, a long procession of causes, a
web of life, infinite sequences bound by the iron
chains of causality.

In illustration, we would quote what we have
said elsewhere in reference to Darwin's picture
of "The Web of Life," — one of the grandest of
all scientific pictures. "What is meant by Dar-
win's picture of the Web of Life, and where did
he paint it? We find it in all his works — a lumin-
ous background — the idea of linkages in nature,
the idea of the correlation of organisms. Cats
have to do with the clover-crop, Darwin says,
and earthworms with the world's bread supply.
If there is an orchid in Madagascar with a spur
eleven inches long, Darwin prophesies that there
is a moth with a proboscis of equal length. No
bird falls to the ground without sending a throb
through a wide circle, for Darwin rears eighty
seedlings from a single clod taken from a bird's
foot. Long nutritive chains may bind the bracken
on the hill-side to the brain of the proprietor —
if he is fond of eating trout. The patent-leather
shoes on his feet connect him with the melan-
choly slaughter of seals, while his ivory-backed

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 31

toilet-brushes implicate him in the passing of
the elephant. There is a ceaseless circulation of
matter and energy. All things flow. Influence
passes from A. to Z., though Z. is quite unaware
of A. What ripples spread and spread from the
introduction of rabbits into Australia, or of
sparrows into the United States, or of the mon-
goose into Jamaica. What absolutely essential
connections there are between cutting down trees
and a plague of insects, between birds and seed-
scattering, between sunlight and the catches of
mackerel" (Darwinism and Human Life, 1909,
p. 10). These and hundreds of similar linkages
seem at first quaint puzzles, but when the house-
that-Jack-built procession of causes is indicated,
they become clear as daylight — as actualities
of inter-relatedness. Our illustrations happen
to be biological, but the idea is universal, and
the outlook for all sorts of inter-relations in
the great system of nature is diagnostic of the
scientific mood. It is often seen in high develop-
ment in men of business, particularly in those
who have geographical interests. For it must
be borne in mind throughout that the scientific
mood is in no way confined to those who pursue
science in the stricter sense.

CULTURE OF THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD. — We do
not apologize for giving so much prominence to
an elementary discussion of the chief charac-

32 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

teristics of the scientific mood. For in a series
like that to which this volume belongs it cannot
be made too clear that science is no "preserve"
for the learned, but the birthright of all. We
must never think of it as something printed and
ponderous and more or less finished, but as
something living in our mind and influencing
our work.

As was admirably said by Mr. Benchara
Branford in an address to students: "Science is
born anew in the deliberate will and intention of
each of us when we succeed in thinking about the
principles of our work in a clear, logical, and
systematic way, and courageously put our con-
clusions to the test of experiment; and the so-
called sciences are the written records of such
thinking, only more extensive, clear, systematic,
and consistent, and more true to reality, because
they have been tested by countless experiments
and experiences in the race."

What would one not give to be able to tell
how the scientific mood may be developed! Our
inheritances are diverse and unequal, and they
limit us; yet much can be gained by "nurture"
and much lost for the lack of it.

A born raconteur is not likely to make a
good man of science even in the best laboratory
in the world, and a man without a dash of poetry
is not likely to acquire it by a diligent perusal

THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 33

of the Faerie Queene, yet it is idle to pretend
that we cannot to some extent influence the
development of our inherited moods by appro-
priate nurture.

By dint of hammering, one becomes a smith,
and it is by doing scientific work that one culti-
vates the scientific habit of mind. Those who
mean to become teachers and investigators may
find inspiration in being apprenticed to a great
master and in a laboratory with great traditions;
those who mean only to become intelligent
citizens of the world — to whom this volume,
with the rest of the Library, is primarily ad-
dressed— may find inspiration in reading scien-
tific "classics," histories of science (astronomy,
best of all), and biographies of the great masters
(such as Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, Helmholtz,
Kelvin, Huxley, Darwin, and Pasteur), but the
scientific temper must be wrought out by each one
for himself.

What we wish to make clear is that the scien-
tific mood does not necessarily demand for its
development the long sea- voyages that meant so
much to Darwin and Huxley, nor the extensive
explorations and long solitudes that meant so
much to Humboldt and Wallace, nor dramatic op-
portunities such as came to Pasteur, nor splendidly
equipped laboratories, nor costly instruments.

What is demanded is within the reach of all

34 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

who will habituate themselves in making sure of
the facts, in precision of statement, in getting
things clear, and hi realizing the complexity of
all situations. These qualities cannot be ac-
quired passively; the kingdom of science must be
taken by force. The scientific mood can only be
engendered by our being actively and energeti-
cally scientific.

It matters little what problem is tackled, but it
should, at first, be one that admits of discipline
in some form of measurement or accurate registra-
tion. It is often well to follow our tendrils of
spontaneous interest towards some subject which
naturally attracts us; but it is also well that we
should undertake some difficult piece of work,
which stretches our brains. In some way those
who would develop the scientific mood must learn
to endure hardness intellectually, remembering
Darwin's recipe: "It's dogged that does it."

SUMMARY. — The scientific mood is especially
marked by a passion for facts, by cautiousness of
statement^ by clearness of vision, and by a sense of
the inter-relatedness of things. It is contrasted with
the emotional or artistic mood and with the practical
mood, but the three form a trinity (of knowing, feel-
ing and doing), which should be unified in every
normal life.

CHAPTER II

THE AIM OF SCIENCE

"The classification of facts, the recognition
of their sequence and relative significance is the
function of science, and the habit of forming a
judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal
feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the
scientific frame of mind." — KARL PEARSON.

Observation, Description, and Formulation — Science and
Common-Sense — The Subject-Matter of Science — De-
scriptive Character of Science — Knowledge of Causes —
Reduction to Simpler Terms — Laws of Nature — Particu-
lar Aims of Different Sciences — The Evolutionary Aim —
Summary.

LONGSTANDING controversies regarding science
and religion, science and theology, science and
philosophy, science and poetry, owe their longev-
ity partly to a misunderstanding of the aim of
Science. We propose, therefore, to devote a
chapter to this subject, which is also of great in-
terest for its own sake.

OBSERVATION, DESCRIPTION, FORMULATION. —
The primary aim of Science is the concise de-
scription of the knowable universe. The man of
35

36 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

scientific mood becomes aware of certain facts
that interest him; he proceeds to become more
intimately aware of them; to make his sensory
experience of them as full as possible. Careful
and critical observation is the first step.

This work of Science, which we may call get-
ting at the facts, is much more difficult of attain-
ment than those who have not tried imagine. One
reason for this is very familiar, — that things are
not always what they seem to be. And though
Science does not raise the characteristic meta-
physical question as to wThat is meant by being
real, it has in its own way to distinguish seeming
from reality. The sun does not rise and set, the
stable Earth is a whirling sphere, the inert body
may be a vortex of rapidly moving corpuscles,
and so on. If Science is to be consistent it has to
set itself to the task of distinguishing realities
from appearances.

Having got his facts, the scientific investigator
proceeds to arrange them, to find their common
denominator, to discover the conditions of their
occurrence, and to describe them as completely
and as simply as possible, and finally to sum
them up in a general formula, often called "a
law of nature."

Aristotle defined this aim when he said: "Art
[or, as we should say, Science] begins when, from
a great number of experiences, one general con-

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 37

ception is formed which will embrace all similar
cases.'5 And the greater part of the clearing-up
which Science effects is not in forming some new
general conception, but in bringing new sets of
facts within the grasp of an old one. When we
make things more intelligible, we do so by dis-
cerning the general beneath the particular,
the "permanent law" beneath the "evanescent
circumstance."

In short, it is the aim of Science to describe
the impersonal facts of experience in verifiable
terms, as exactly as possible, as simply as pos-
sible., and as completely as possible. It is an in-
tellectual construction — a working thought-model
of the world. In its universe of discourse it keeps
always to experiential terms or verifiable sym-
bolical derivates of these.

SCIENCE AND COMMON-SENSE. — It is somewhat
remarkable that several investigators of distinc-
tion have compared Science to common-sense.
We are told that "A most simple description of
true science is embraced in the words: Keep your
eyes open and apply common-sense." Prof. P.
G. Tait was wont to say that Science aims at
giving "a common-sense view of the world we
live in." Huxley emphasized the idea that
"Science is nothing but trained and organized
common-sense."

It seems to us that it would be nearer the truth

38 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

to say that Science is sharply contrasted with
common-sense. Thus one of the most marked
characteristics of science is its critical quality,
which is just what common-sense lacks. By
common-sense is usually meant either the con-
sensus of public opinion, of unsystematic every-
day thinking, the untrustworthiness of which is
notorious, or the verdict of uncritical sensory
experience, which has so often proved fallacious.
It was "common-sense" that kept the planets
circling round the earth; it was "common-
sense" that refused to accept Harvey's demon-
stration of the circulation of the blood.

THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SCIENCE. — We have
already pointed out that Science is independent
of any particular order of facts. It takes the
knowable universe for its subject; it deals with
psychical as well as physical processes, with Man
as much as with Nature; it has to do with every-
thing to which its methods can be applied. What
makes a study scientific is not, of course, the
nature of the things with which it is concerned,
but the method by which it deals with these
things. A study of a skylark is not necessarily
zoological.

The subject-matter of Science includes all
clearly defined facts of experience which are
communicable and verifiable. There are three
points here to be attended to. (1) Before Science

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 39

really begins, a preliminary sifting is often neces-
sary to distinguish supposed facts seen by the
untutored eye from clearly defined facts. (2)
The facts that Science takes to do with are
"real," and "what is real means something
which we do not make, but find." As Thomas
Hobbes of Malmesbury said in his great Levia-
than (1651): "Natural History is the history of
such facts or effects of nature as have no de-
pendence on man's will." (3) Only one self-
denying ordinance has Science imposed on itself
in regard to its subject-matter. The ordinance
is that Science shall consist only of the com-
municable and verifiable. However real certain
personal experiences may be to us, we are re-
strained by boundaries of our own erection from
calling these experiences scientific territory. They
may be, but they are not until it is shown that
similar personal experiences will be enjoyed by
all who place themselves in the appropriate
conditions.

DESCRIPTIVE CHARACTER OF SCIENCE. — When
the aim of Science is spoken of as "description"
the word is used in a slightly technical sense.
There is a preliminary description which is not
more than a faithful record of observations —
the kind of description which Linnaeus, for in-
stance, excelled in giving for a species of plant or
animal. But this is only intellectual photography,

40 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

good, but only a means to an end, — to a higher
kind of description which is characteristically
scientific.

When we say that the object of Science is "the
complete and consistent description of the facts
of experience in the simplest possible terms/'
we are adopting a view — held by such authorities
as Kirchhoff, Mach, Karl Pearson, and Ward —
which is to many minds disappointing. De-
scription seems such a tame term to apply to the
function of Science, which, we are told, is to
solve the riddles of the universe.

When we come to think it over, however, or
better still, when we try to work it out, "a com-
plete and consistent description in the simplest
possible terms" is no small achievement. It
must leave nothing out, it must be consistent
with itself, with the rest of the science of which
it forms a part, with Science as a whole, with the
formal conditions of experience in general. Of
a truth, "complete and consistent description"
will tax our intellectual thews and sinews. And
it must be in the simplest possible terms, which
means penetrating analysis, careful reduction to
the lowest common denominator. And the terms
must be such as are accessible to direct experience
or to indirect experimental testing. Such is the
aim of Science.

Behind the first feeling of disappointment

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 41

with the definition of Science as a description of
the facts of experience, there lurks a second: Is
the explanation of things to be given up? Is it
not the office of Science to get behind description
and to supply explanation? The answer to that
question is this: (a) The vulgar belief that
Science has "explained everything" is a hope-
less misunderstanding. As we shall afterwards
find, it would be nearer the truth to say that
Science has explained nothing. (6) Science does
not even try to refer facts of experience to any
ultimate reality. That is not its business, (c) In
a limited sense Science explains things, namely,
by reducing them to simpler terms, by discover-
ing the conditions of their occurrence, and by
disclosing their history. What do we mean when
we say that Physics has accounted for the tides,
or that Physiology has made some function of
the body much more intelligible than it used to
be? What is meant is that we have gained a
general conception of the nature of the facts in
question, and that we are able to relate them to
some general formula. In this sense only does
Science explain things, and it does not really get
beyond a description.

KNOWLEDGE OF CAUSES. — We must admit
that there is good sense in the popular impres-
sion that it is the aim of Science to discover the
causes of things. What is Science for if it does

42 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

not make our experience of the world around us
and of ourselves more intelligible, and does not
this increased intelligibility depend in great part
on the discovery of causes? Science has been
defined, indeed, by a distinguished physiologist,
Prof. Gotch, as "the causative arrangement of
phenomena."

But how is this consistent with the descriptive
view of Science? We have seen that Science does
not "explain" anything. But what else is the
discovery of causes?

To answer this question involves a brief
digression into a difficult and dangerous terri-
tory,— the meaning of cause. The first point that
we must be clear about is that in the natural
sciences, the causes which are discovered are
"secondary" or "caused causes," the question
of ultimate causes not being raised; and that
they are "efficient," not "final" causes, not
giving any answer to the question "Why?" In
the natural sciences the word cause is used in
the sense indicated by Mill, — "a cause which is
itself a phenomenon without reference to the
ultimate cause of anything." Causation, Mill
said, is simply uniform antecedence.

But even after we have become clear that
Science has not to do with a First Cause, or
with Final Causes, great ambiguities remain.
As Prof. Bergson points out, even in scientific

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 43

discourse three different meanings of the term
" cause" are frequently confused. "A cause may
act by impelling, by releasing, or by unwinding.
The billiard-ball, that strikes another, determines
its movement by impelling. The spark that ex-
plodes the powder acts by releasing. The gradual
relaxing of the spring that makes the phono-
graph turn, unwinds the melody inscribed on
the cylinder: if the melody which is played be
the effect, and the relaxing of the spring the
cause, we must say that the cause acts by un-
winding.

"What distinguishes these three cases from
each other is the greater or less solidarity between
the cause and the effect. In the first, the quan-
tity and quality of the effect vary with the
quantity and quality of the cause. In the second,
neither quality nor quantity of the effect varies
with quality and quantity of the cause: the
effect is invariable. In the third, the quantity
of the effect depends on the quantity of the
cause, but the cause does not influence the
quality of the effect: the longer the cylinder
turns by the action of the spring, the more of the
melody I shall hear, but the nature of the melody,
or of the part heard, does not depend on the
action of the spring.

"Only in the first case, really, does cause ex-
plain effect; in the others the effect is more or

44 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

less given in advance, and the antecedent in-
voked is — in different degrees, of course — its
occasion rather than its cause."

In the first case, where the cause acts by im-
pulsion, what is in the effect was already in the
cause; the momentum of the one billiard-ball
passes in great part into the other; the causal
explanation is complete.

In the second case, where the cause acts by
releasing, it is an indispensable condition; it
pulls the trigger apart from which the effect will
not occur. But it does not explain the effect.
The egg of a sea-urchin will develop without
being fertilized if it be immersed for a short time
in sea-water to which some magnesium chloride
or the like has been added, and there are many
other ways of inducing "artificial parthenogene-
sis." But the cause in this case in only a trigger-
puller.

In the third case, there is more than trigger-
pulling, but the cause does not explain more
than the rate or duration of the effect.

People are wont to recognize themselves as the
"causes" of this or that result, congratulating
themselves on being the "happy cause of success,"
blaming themselves as being the "unfortunate
cause of disaster," and this idea of an active agent
effecting a change in something passive often
influences the popular conception of causality.

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 45

Science seeks to free itself from this anthropo-
morphism.

It is part of the business of Science to account
for the occurrence of events, and it does so by
disclosing their "efficient causes." This simply
means that the event in question is shown to be
determined by preceding events; one particular
set of circumstances giving rise to another.

Let us here seek the aid of a scientific phi-
losopher, Prof. A. E. Taylor. "The notion of
causation as a transaction between two things
is replaced in the experimental sciences by the
conception of it as merely the determination of an
event by antecedent events. Similarly, with the
disappearance of things as the vehicles of causal
processes falls the whole distinction between an
active and a passive factor. As it becomes more
and more apparent that the antecedent events
which condition an occurrence are a complex
plurality and include states of what is popularly
called the thing acted upon as well as processes
in the so-called agent, science substitutes for the
distinction between agent and patient the con-
cept of a system of reciprocally dependent inter-
acting factors. These two substitutions give us
the current scientific conception of a cause as the
* totality of the conditions' in the presence of
which an event occurs, and in the absence
of any member of which it does not occur.

46 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

More briefly, causation in the current scientific
sense means sequence under definitely known
conditions."

This view of cause and effect as earlier and
later stages of the same continuous process,
unified by a pervading principle, brings us back
to the "descriptive" ideal of scientific explana-
tion. "According to this doctrine, advocated
by such eminent thinkers as Kirchhoff, Mach,
and Ostwald among physicists, and, with various
modifications, Avenarius, Miinsterberg, Royce,
and James Ward among recent philosophers, the
ultimate ideal of science, or at any rate of physi-
cal science, is simply the description of the course
of events by the aid of the fewest and simplest
general formulae. Why things happen as they
do, it is now said, is no proper question for science;
its sole business is to enable us to calculate how
they happen."

REDUCTION TO SIMPLER TERMS. — It is the
continual aim of science to reduce the number
of categories or necessary concepts. This is
the art of wielding William of Occam's razor —
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessi-
tatem." "Entities are not to be multiplied be-
yond necessity." Of the effort to reduce the
categories let us take a famous illustration. On
the occasion of his jubilee (1896) as Professor of
Natural Philosophy, Lord Kelvin, then a veteran

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 47

of seventy-two, surprised many by a remarkable
utterance: "One word characterizes the most
strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of
science that I have made perseveringly during
fifty-five years; that word is failure. I know no
more of electric and magnetic force, or of the
relation between ether, electricity, and ponder-
able matter than I knew and tried to teach my
students of natural philosophy fifty years ago
in my first session as Professor."

It is instructive to inquire — from the experts,
of course — what this indefatigable genius, whose
life was a sequence of brilliant successes, meant
by speaking of failure. Prof. Silvanus P. Thomp-
son in his Life of Lord Kelvin explains the case.
"The trend of modern ultra-physics with respect
to the constitution of matter is towards the fol-
lowing five categories: (1) the ether, that is, the
plenum filling space; (2) the electron, conceived
as a plexus in the ether, probably of two species;

(3) the atom, a complex of electrons in the ether;

(4) the molecule, a specific group of atoms (or in
some cases one atom); (5) the mass, an assem-
blage of molecules. Energy is involved in the
construction of any of these out of any other.

"Lord Kelvin's effort seems to have been to
find a theory to reduce the necessary concepts
to the smallest number — matter and energy, or, by
means of the vortex theory, to ether and energy.

48 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

In the end he found it necessary to bring in eleo
tricity as well. But who shall call this failure? "
We understand, however, why Kelvin himself,
actuated by the desire to reduce all physical
phenomena within the duality of matter and
energy — an ideally scientific desire — should con-
fess in this respect to failure.

In connection with the reduction of natural
processes to simpler terms, we must be careful
not to allow the idea to become tyrannical. It
is not always possible to effect a reduction, and
it is not always relevant. Moreover, it is not
always easy to make sure that the reduction is
complete; some residual phenomena may escape
which are at the very heart of the matter.

We cannot describe thinking in physiological
terms, still less in physical terms. By psycho-
logical analysis we may perhaps make it more
intelligible, but not otherwise. That is to say,
we cannot bring it under any general biological
or physical concept. And although we are sure
that a thinking man developed in time out of a
fertilized egg-cell, we cannot reduce the activities
of the thinking man to what we know of the activ-
ities of the cell. And, again, as we shall explain
more fully in the section on "particular aims,"
even if a physico-chemical reduction were effected
of all that goes on in the cell, that would not give
us a useful biological account of its behaviour,

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 49

e. g. of its development. For that requires a
historical explanation.

LAWS OF NATURE. — If Science is only de-
scription, what is to be said of the Laws of
Nature, which Science has discovered, which,
moreover, things used to "obey," when we were
at school? Let us find an answer to this question
in the words of a keen investigator, who, having
helped to make physical laws, should know some-
thing about them. "We must confess," says
Prof. J. H. Poynting, "that physical laws have
greatly fallen off in dignity. No long time ago
they were quite commonly described as the Fixed
Laws of Nature, and were supposed sufficient in
themselves to govern the universe. Now we
can only assign to them the humble rank of
mere descriptions, often erroneous, of similar-
ities which we believe we have observed" (Ad-
dress, British Association, 1889, p. 616).

Prof. Poynting goes on to say that a "law
of nature explains nothing — it has no govern-
ing power, it is but a descriptive formula which
the careless have sometimes personified. There
may be psychological and social generalizations
which really tell us why this or that occurs, but
chemical and physical generalizations are wholly
concerned with the how."

In other words, concurrently with the change
in our conception of physical law has come a

50 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

change in our conception of physical explanation.
The change is in our recognizing that "we explain
an event not when we know 'why' it happened,
but when we know 'how' it is like something else
happening elsewhere or otherwise — when, in fact,
we can include it as a case described by some law
already set forth. In explanation we do not ac-
count for the event, but we improve our account
of it by likening it to what we already know. "

It is a common problem of science to account
for a given state of things, — the appearance of
an island, a cold summer, a succession of fine
sunsets, a shower of gossamer, a butterfly coming
out of a cocoon, and so on. In what way does
science account for these things? By a descrip-
tion of the conditions of their coming about, and
in proportion to the completeness and generality
of that description is our satisfaction with the
account that is given. We are particularly well
satisfied when what seemed to be an exception
is shown to prove the rule — that is to say, when
an apparently strange event is shown to con-
form to an established law.

Let us take a concrete case given by Prof.
Karl Pearson (Grammar of Science, ed. 1900, p.
99). "The law of gravitation is a brief descrip-
tion of how every particle of matter in the uni-
verse is altering its motion with reference to every
other particle. It does not tell us why particles

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 51

thus move; it does not tell us why the earth de-
scribes a certain curve round the sun. It simply
resumes, in a few brief words, the relationships
observed between a vast range of phenomena.
It economizes thought by stating in conceptual
shorthand that routine of our perceptions which
forms for us the universe of gravitating matter."

To the same purpose, in his impressive His-
tory of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century 9
Dr. J. T. Merz writes: "A complete and simple
description — admitting of calculation — is the aim
of all exact science. . . . We shall not expect to
find the ultimate and final causes, and science will
not teach us to understand nature and life. . . .
Science means 'the analysis of phenomena as
to their appearance in space and their sequence
in time.' ' Or again, the true nature of scien-
tific explanation is suggested by Kirchhoff's defi-
nition of mechanics, as the science of motion,
whose object it is "to describe completely and
in the simplest manner the motions that occur
in nature."

Huxley expressed the same general view of the
Laws of Nature in a letter to Kingsley in 1863: —

"This universe is, I conceive, like to a great
game being played out, and we poor mortals
are allowed to take a hand. By great good for-
tune the wiser among us have made out some
few of the rules of the game, as at present played.

52 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

We call them 'Laws of Nature/ and honour
them because we find that if we obey them we
win something for our pains. The cards are
our theories and hypotheses, the tricks our experi-
mental verifications."

PARTICULAR AIMS OF DIFFERENT SCIENCES.
— It was Kant who said that any branch of
knowledge contains just so much science as it
contains of mathematics; and this is not very
different from saying that all science begins with
measurement. If this view is pressed it leads to
the conclusion that the only perfect science is
mechanics, and that the only quite precise ^sciences
are those dealing with processes which can be
analysed into the motions of ideal corpuscles.

This seems to us an impracticable ideal of
precision, for it must be noted that facts whose
mechanical analysis is not within sight need not
on that account be treated unscientifically.
They may be measured, though not with the
same measure as is used for the stars in their
courses. Complex as are the inborn variations
of plants and animals, they can be treated by
the same statistical methods as are used in
recording the simple phenomena observed when
dice are thrown ten thousand times. Myste-
rious as are the facts of inheritance, the expert
can occasionally prophesy safely as to the nature
of the chicks which will emerge from an unhatched

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 53

setting of eggs. There is a great deal of precise
measurement in physiology and psychology which
has led or is leading to exact science, though not
to mechanical re-description.

Moreover, to return to a consideration referred
to in the section on reduction, we are very strongly
of opinion that Biology does not necessarily make
progress towards perfection by the mechanical
analysis of changes that go on in living bodies.
That kind of analysis or reduction to the lowest
terms is an engine of research which must be
worked for all it is worth, but it does not directly
answer any biological questions. For Biology
has a particular end — that of describing the life
of plants and animals, and that end is not
necessarily achieved by discoveries in the physics
and chemistry of living bodies. We watch a
bird building its nest. We know that there is
an intricate sequence of physical and chemical
changes going on in its body. We feel sure that
nothing occurs that contradicts any of the es-
tablished laws of chemistry and physics. We
do not know whether a complete chemical and
physical description of what occurs is realizable
or not. We know that it has not been given.
But we feel sure that if it were given it would
not directly help us to understand the bird build-
ing its nest. For that requires a different kind
of description — with different concepts, which

54 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

recognize the bird as an historic being with a
mind of its own.

Comte maintained very strongly that mechan-
ical principles broke down as inapplicable be-
yond the physical order, but that is not quite
the point. They are applicable in Biology; they
have been of great service as a means of inves-
tigation in Biology; their application has brought
the characteristically vital into bolder relief. But
the point is that they are not exhaustive of what
occurs, and that they do not give us distinc-
tively biological descriptions.

It must be clearly understood that Biology
has an aim far wider than that of giving an
account of the physical and chemical processes
that go on in the living body. It has to tell
the story of individual development, the story of
racial evolution, and the story of the everyday
behaviour of the organism. It has to recognize
the past living on in the present, the individ-
uality and spontaneity of the creature, and,
often at least, a dramatic element in life — much,
in fact, that requires a kind of description very
different from that of Chemistry and Physics.
In the same way it might be shown that Psy-
chology has a particular aim of its own, which is
distinct from that of Biology.

More generally stated, the important idea
which we wish to make clear is that what defines

THE AIM OF SCIENCE 55

a science is not its subject-matter, but its point
of view, — the particular kind of question it
asks. The lark singing at heaven's gate is a
fact of experience which may be studied phy-
sically, biologically, and psychologically, but
a complete answer to the questions asked by
Physics would not answer those asked by Biol-
ogy, still less those asked by Psychology.

THE EVOLUTIONARY AIM. — The end of Science
is not reached in the formulation of things as
they are, it has also an historical or evolution-
ary aim. In every department of knowledge
the question we are continually asking is — "How
have these things come to be? " The solar system
is traced back to a vast nebula.

"The solid earth on which we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began."

There are hints of inorganic evolution, one kind
of matter giving rise to another, as Uranium
to Radium. There is a history if not a sermon
in every stone. And when we come to organ-
isms we find evolution in the stricter sense, race
giving rise to race by processes of slow trans-
formation still very imperfectly understood. The
conception extends to language and literature, to
art and institutions, to everything. It is in this
genetic view of Nature and of Man that Science
completes itself, and joins hands with Philosophy.

56 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

SUMMARY. — The aim of Science is to describe
the impersonal facts of experience in verifiable
terms as exactly as possible, as simply as possible,
and as completely as possible. It is an intellectual
construction, — a working thought-model of the world.
In its "universe of discourse" it keeps always to
experiential terms, or verifiable derivatives of these.
It is as far on one side of common-sense as poetry
is on the other. It deals with "facts" which have
no dependence on man's will, which must be com-
municable and verifiable. It is descriptive formu-
lation, not interpretative explanation. The causes
that Science seeks after are secondary causes, not
ultimate causes; effective causes, not final causes.
Indeed, its causes and effects are simply earlier
and later stages of the same continuous process.
Science always seeks to reduce things to a common
denominator and to reduce the number of categories
or necessary concepts. The "Laws of Nature"
are descriptive formulas in "conceptual shorthand"
of the routine of our perceptions. Each science has
its distinctive questions and concepts of its own.
The end of Science is not reached in the formula-
tion of things as they are, it has also to describe
how they have come to be.

CHAPTER III

SCIENTIFIC METHOD

"Induction for deduction, with a view ta
construction." — COMTE.

The Logic of Science— The Keen Eye— Collecting Data-
Measurement — Arrangement of Data — Analysis and Re-
duction— Hypothesis — Test Experiments and Control
Experiments — Formulation — The Scientific Use of the
Imagination — The Fundamental Postulate of Science-
Summary.

SCIENCE is not wrapped up with any particular
body of facts; it is characterized as an intellectual
attitude. It is not tied down to any peculiar
methods of inquiry; it is simply sincere critical
thought, which admits conclusions only when
these are based on evidence. We may get a good
lesson in scientific method from a business man
meeting some new practical problem, from a
lawyer sifting evidence, or from a statesman
framing a constructive bill.

How, then, does science differ from ordinary
knowledge? It is criticised, systematized, and
generalized knowledge. That is to say, the stu-
dent of science takes more pains than the man
57

58 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

in the street does to get at the facts; he is not
content with sporadic knowledge, but will have
as large a body of facts as he can get; he systema-
tizes these data and his inferences from them, and
sums up in a generalization or formula. In all
this he observes certain logical processes, certain
orders of inference, and we call this scientific
method.

THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE. — Of modes of inference
there are no more than there were in the days of
Aristotle, who recognized three: (a) from particu-
lar to particular (analogical reasoning), (6) from
particulars to general (inductive reasoning), (c)
from general to particular (deductive reasoning).
Let us take a few examples.

(a) Analogical Reasoning. — The geologist tells
us the story of the making of the earth and
describes what happened millions of years ago,
and in many cases he relies on analogical reason-
ing. From the consequences of particular happen-
ings to-day he infers the efficient causes of events
that happened in the Devonian age. He sheds
the light of the present on the dark abysses of
the past.

When Darwin argued from the particular vari-
ations which he observed in his domesticated
pigeons and cultivated plants to variations which
might have occurred in unthinkably distant aeons,
he was trusting to analogical reasoning. Often

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 59

it is the only alternative, but it should be used
with restraint in arguing from the present to re-
mote antiquity, for it is obvious that some impor-
tant difference between the conditions then and
those of to-day may invalidate the argument.

(6) Inductive Reasoning. — This is argument
from particulars to the universal, and science is
full of illustrations. " Galileo had smooth inclined
planes made; and then, by rolling balls down
them and measuring the times and squares of
descent, he discovered inductively that the space
fallen is always as the square of the time of fall-
ing; so that, if a body in one second of time falls
about sixteen feet, in two seconds it will have
fallen sixty-four feet, four times as far (time 2-
squared), in three seconds one hundred and forty-
four feet, nine times as far (time 3-squared)."

The inductive method may almost be called
Baconian, for Bacon was the first to show that
the sound way of studying Nature was to work
up from particulars to principles. He called his
method the new instrument — the Novum Orga-
num. It was founded on the principle that things
which are always present, absent, or varying
together, are casually connected.

(c) Deductive Reasoning. — This is argument
from the universal to particulars, the kind of
inference which enables the long arm of science
to reach back through the ages that are past and

60 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

forward into those which are to come. By deduc-
tion Neptune was discovered before it was seen.
By deduction, given three good observations of
a passing comet, we can predict its return to a
night.

As a good example, cited by Prof. Case, of the
abuse of the deductive method by one of the
greatest of all intellects, we may recall an argu-
ment used by Aristotle to support the old circular
astronomy. The stars are eternal and must have
eternal motion. The only eternal motion is circu-
lar. Therefore the stars move in circles round the
earth. "It is a case of two hypothetical premises
leading to a false conclusion. Every step is false.
There is nothing for it but experience. The real
question is how the stars move in point of fact."

It is not within the scope of this little book to
enter into a detailed discussion of the various
scientific methods — such as the mathematical, the
empirical, the explanatory, and the verificatory,
which Mill distinguished. But there are two
important considerations to be borne in mind,
— first, that great conclusions seem often to be
reached by a flash of imaginative genius, perhaps
the expression of long-continued processes of sub-
conscious cerebration; and, second, that in actual
practice induction and deduction are mingled in
intricate ways.

In many instances we find that experiment and

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 61

induction have afforded a basis from which deduc-
tion has reached far beyond experience. The
supreme illustration of the power of combined
methods is to be found in Newton's Principia, for
here, as Prof. Case has shown in detail, the
method is neither the deductive Aristotelian, nor
the inductive Baconian, but both; it is the inter-
action of induction and deduction in a mixed
method. "The full title, Philosophic? Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, implies a combination of
induction and deduction. It is also a combination
of analysis and synthesis: it proceeds from facts
to causes as well as from causes to facts."

THE KEEN EYE. — We use this phrase, meta-
phorically as well as literally, to describe what
may be called a preliminary condition of all
scientific investigation — one certainly that has led
to many discoveries. We mean the observant
habit, the alert mind, the appetized intelligence,
the inquisitive spirit, which notices whatever is
unusual, which sees a problem in the most com-
monplace occurrences. It is difficult to define
this quality, which is at its highest when sensory
alertness is combined with a habit of wondering
and pondering.

Of Clerk Maxwell, who "enriched the inherit-
ance left by Newton and consolidated the work
of Faraday," it is said that his first recollection
was that of lying on the grass before his father's

62 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

Louse, and looking at the sun, and wondering. It
was said of Edward Forbes, one of the most
brilliant of British naturalists, that "he had a
hawk's eye to see in a moment any plant that was
new." And it is our impression, based on the
history of science, that — apart from genius — most
discoveries have been psychologically due to a
combination of the keen eye with the inquisitive
spirit. Let us recall what Tyndall has told us of
the way in which Robert Mayer was led to his
theory of energy.

"In the summer of 1840, as he himself informs
us, he was at Java, and there observed that the
venous brood of some of his patients had a singu-
larly bright red colour. The observation riveted
his attention; he reasoned upon it, and came to
the conclusion that the brightness of the colour
was due to the fact that a less amount of oxida-
tion sufficed to keep up the temperature of the
body in a hot climate than in a cold one. The
darkness of the venous blood he regarded as the
visible sign of the energy of oxidation" (Tyndall,
1876, p. 274).

He was drawn to the whole question of animal
heat, to the relation between heat generated and
work done, and to his remarkable contributions
to the mechanical theory of heat in particular,
and to the theory of energy in general. All roads
lead to Rome, and he must be a bold man who

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 63

will declare any of Nature's beckonings to be
unworthy of attention.

COLLECTING DATA. — The first step in beginning
the scientific study of a problem is to collect the
data, which are or ought to be "facts." And by
this we mean, in Prof. Taylor's words, "experiences
which we cannot altogether fashion as we please
to suit our own convenience, or our own sense of
what is fitting or desirable, but have largely to
accept as they come to us." As is often said,
"Facts are chiels that winna' ding" — that is to
say, they cannot be coerced or denied, and they
are verifiable by all who have equal opportunities
and equipment for experiencing them.

In the so-called "natural sciences" this collec-
tion of data implies observation, and much
depends on the degree of excellence which the
observer attains. The fundamental virtues are
clearness, precision, impartiality, and caution.
Common vices are rough and ready records, reli-
ance on vague impressions, acceptance of second-
hand evidence, and picking the facts that suit.
Since observers are fallible mortals, we readily
understand the importance of co-operation, of
independent observations on the same subject,
of instrumental means of increasing the range
and delicacy of our senses, and of automatic
impersonal methods of registration such as pho-
tography supplies.

64 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

MEASUREMENT. — In collecting data for scien-
tific thinking the fundamental virtue is accuracy,
and it is impossible to exaggerate its importance.
Science begins with measurement, with which we
include, of course, every method of precise reg-
istration.

Many advances, Lord Kelvin said, have owed
their origin to protracted drudgery. "Accurate
and minute measurement seems to the non-scien-
tific imagination a less lofty and dignified work
than looking for something new. But nearly all
the grandest discoveries of science have been but
the rewards of accurate measurement and patient,
long-continued labour in the minute sifting of
numerical results." In illustration he instanced
the discovery of the law of gravitation by Newton,
Faraday's theory of specific inductive capacity,
Joule's law of thermo-dynamics, and that of the
continuity of the gaseous and liquid states by
Andrews.

One of the most instructive recent illustrations
of the value of attending to little hints is to be
found in the story of the discovery of argon. Lord
Rayleigh made a number of precise weighings of
the oxygen contained in a carefully weighed and
measured glass flask at 15° C. and 760 mm.
There were very minute differences in the weights
recorded, — affecting the fourth decimal place. He
then made a series of weighings of pure nitrogen

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 6$

in the same vessel, and took note of the minute
differences in the weights recorded. Especially
were there differences in the weighings of nitrogen
made from certain of its compounds and nitrogen
obtained by removing oxygen, water, traces of
carbonic acid and other impurities from atmo-
spheric air. As the differences between the
weighings seemed greater than the possibilities of
error, the possibility suggested itself that the
nitrogen derived from the air might not be quite
pure.

Now in 1785 Cavendish, in his analysis of aii^
had also tried whether the removal of nearly
twenty-one volumes of oxygen and a small quan-
tity of carbonic acid from one hundred volumes of
atmospheric air left pure nitrogen. His testing left
a residual bubble of something. It might, Caven-
dish thought, have been introduced accidentally
during the manipulations, but he also suggested
that it might be a gas neither nitrogen nor oxygen,
and, if so, that there was about one volume of it
to every hundred of atmospheric nitrogen. For
more than a century the question rested.

But in 1894 Lord Rayleigh and Sir William
Ramsay, in considering the discrepancies in the
weighings of atmospheric nitrogen, remembered
Cavendish's residual bubble, and Sir William
Ramsay speedily discovered that it consisted of
argon (about one and a half times as heavy as

« INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

nitrogen) and some other elementary gases. The
discovery was the reward of precision and a sig-
nal instance of the value of attending to even
minute discrepancies.

It is doubtless a pity when circumstances lead
a man of science to spend his whole life in collect-
ing data and in measurement, but it is ungenerous
and unwise to speak of this in a superior way as
** hodman's work." Let us take an illustration
from the volume of Astronomy by Mr. Hinks —
the somewhat monotonous and quantitative work
of star-cataloguing, which Hipparchus is supposed
to have begun more than a century before Christ,
which is continued even unto this day. What is
the use of it? The author points out (1) that it
forms an essential basis for the applications of
astronomy — the determination of time, naviga-
tion, surveying; (2) that without good star places
we can have no theory of the motions in the solar
system; and (3) that "without accurate catalogues
of the stars we can know nothing of the grander
problems of the universe, the motion of our
sun among the stars, or of the stars among
themselves."

In addition to its necessity in furnishing
materials for Science, there is great educational
value in the discipline of making definite and
accurate measurements. Speaking of its utility,
wen for those students who were destined for the

SCIENTIFIC METHOD OT

Church, Lord Kelvin said in an address at Bangor:
"There is one thing I feel strongly in respect to
investigation in physical or chemical laboratories
— it leaves no room for shady, doubtful distinc-
tions between truth, half-truth, whole falsehood.
In the laboratory everything tested or tried is
found either true or not true. Every result is
true. Nothing not proved true is a result; there
is no such thing as doubtfulness." It is very
interesting that Clerk Maxwell should speak iu
one sentence of "those aspirations after accuracy
in measurement, and justice in action, which we
reckon among our noblest attributes as men."

ARRANGEMENT OF DATA. — In many cases the
accumulation of data has to be followed by not
less laborious arrangement. The facts have to
be classified, and that from different points of
view, and without prejudice. The object of this
is to discover correlations and uniformities of
sequence. In dealing with an enormous mass
of facts in regard to the Migration of Birds;
one of the leading inquirers into this fascinat-
ing subject, Mr. Eagle Clarke, of the Royal Scot-
tish Museum, required more time for the orderly
classification of the data than was required for
their collection.

Just as observation is made incalculably more
effective by the use of instruments, so in classify-
ing and registering facts, the use of statistical

68 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

devices — curves and the like — is invaluable, as is
well illustrated in their successful application to
the difficult problems of biometries, notably of
variation and heredity.

Bad observation may invalidate the whole
scientific process, but carelessness in the arrange-
ment of data may be equally fatal. It has often
happened that attending to some minute discrep-
ancy revealed in the classification of data has led
to the elucidation of the whole problem. Thus it
Las become a maxim that no apparent departure
from the rule should be treated as trivial. It may
mean an error of observation; it has often led,
e. g. in Chemistry and Astronomy, to an impor-
tant clue.

ANALYSIS AND REDUCTION. — In many scientific
inquiries it is necessary to pass below the every-
day facts of experience to those that underlie
them. There is a process of analysis or reduction
to simpler terms. In order to understand the
first facts better we try to resolve them into
others, which can be described in simpler or more
generalized terms. There are all sorts of analyses
and reductions — dissecting an animal, cutting
microscopic sections of a rock, making a chemical
analysis of a substance — and their utilization is
indispensable.

HYPOTHESIS. — We mean by a scientific hypoth-
esis a provisional formulation, a tentative solu-

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 6»

tion, and it is part of the scientific method to
make them and test them. While there seems
to be no doubt that some scientific conclusions
have arisen in the mind of the investigator as
if by a flash of insight, in the majority of cases
the process of discovery is a slower one. The
scientific imagination devises a possible solution
— an hypothesis — and the investigator proceeds
to test it. He makes intellectual keys and then
tries whether they fit the lock. If the hypothesis
does not fit, it is rejected and another is made.
The scientific workshop is full of discarded keys.

It need hardly be said that whether the hy-
pothesis is reached imaginatively or laboriously,
whether it is suggested by induction from many
particulars or as a deduction from some previously
established conclusion, it has to be tried and
tested until it rises to the rank of a theory.

TEST EXPERIMENTS AND CONTROL EXPERI-
MENTS.— The distinction between observation
and experiment is not of much importance. In
the former we study the natural course of events;
in the latter we arrange artificially for certain
things to occur. The method of experiment
saves time and we can make surer of the condi-
tions. In studying the effect of electric discharges
on living plants, it would be worse than tedious
to wait for the lightning to strike trees in our
vicinity, so we mimic the natural phenomena ia

TO INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the laboratory. In studying phenomena like
hybridization, we are obviously on much surer
ground with experiment than with observation
in natural conditions.

L Alterations in the conditions of occurrence
which it might be difficult or impossible to
arrange in Nature can be readily effected in the
laboratory. It is thus possible to discover which
of the antecedents are causally important. Cattle
begin to die of some mysterious epidemic disease;
bacteria are found to be abundant in the dead
bodies; it is conjectured that the disease is
bacterial. Some of the bacteria are peculiar, and
it is observed that they occur in all the victims.
The hypothesis is made that this particular species
of bacterium is responsible for the disease. But
since the epoch-making experiments of Koch
which showed that Bacillus anthracis is the cause
of anthrax (splenic fever, or wool-sorter's disease
in man), no one dreams of stopping short of the
experimental test. The suspected bacillus is
isolated, a pure culture is made, this is injected
into a healthy animal, and if the disease ensues
the proof is complete.

Besides furnishing fresh data, an experiment
may be of use at a later stage in scientific proce-
dure, namely, in putting the hypothesis to the
proof; and much of the success of a scientific
worker often depends on his ingenuity in think-

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 71

ing out these crucial or test experiments. Let us
notice two or three examples.

When bacteriology was still in its infancy, and
Pasteur was still fighting for his discovery that
putrefaction was due to the life of micro-organ-
isms in the rotting substance, he put his theory
to a crucial test which is continually repeated
now-a-days as a class experiment or for practical
purposes in the preservation of various foods. He
took some readily putrescible substances, steri-
lized them by boiling, and hermetically sealed
the vessel. No putrefaction occurred.

When Von Siebold and his fellow-workers
had convinced themselves indirectly that certain
bladderworms, e. g. those which occur in the pig
and the ox, were the young stages of certain
tapeworms which occur in man, they made the
crucial and almost heroic experiment of swallow-
ing the bladderworms. By becoming soon after-
wards infected with the tapeworms they proved
the truth of their theory.

Or let us take a simple case where the method
of exclusion is combined with a control experi-
ment. The freshwater crayfish has a sense of
smell, as is proved by the rapid way in which it
retreats from strong odours. Investigation led
to the hypothesis that this sense was located in.
the antennules or smaller feelers. This was
verified by observing that a crayfish bereft of

7£ INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

these appendages did not react to a strong odour,
whereas — here the control experiment comes in
— in exactly the same conditions and to the same
stimulus another crayfish with its antennules
intact did actively respond. Pursuing precisely
the same two methods, the investigator proved
that the seat of smell was in peculiarly shaped
bristles on the outer fork of the antennules.

A great experimental philosopher is reported
to have said: "Show me the scientific man who
never made a mistake, and I will show you one
who never made a discovery." This was in allu-
sion to the everyday method of "trial and error,"
which is part of the logic of experimenting.
Different hypotheses are tried till the one that
fits the facts is found.

It is interesting to notice that a scientific con-
clusion may sometimes be safely accepted before
its demonstration is visibly complete, a famous
instance being Harvey's demonstration of the
circulation of the blood (1628). From the struc-
ture of the heart, the observed flow in different
parts of the system, and the valves in the veins, he
almost completely demonstrated the circulation.
Only one step was awanting. "Harvey's diffi-
culty lay in the circumstance that as the micro-
scope was not in use, no known path existed by
which the blood could be conveyed from the
smallest arteries into the smallest veins; there was

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 73

a gap in the vascular series, but his demonstra-
tion made it a logical certainty that a bridge
across this gap was in existence" (Gotch, 1906,
p. 47). Although it was not till 1661 that Mal-
pighi saw the blood flowing through transparent
capillaries from the smallest arteries to the
smallest veins, Harvey's demonstration might
have passed at once into physiological science
(which was far from being its reception) for the
simple reason that it was an observed fact that
the blood goes on ceaselessly flowing throughout
life. The system works, therefore the unseen
bridge across the gap must be there.

FORMULATION. — The final step in scientific
method is to sum up what has been proved in
terms as clear and terse as possible. A theory is
stated, a formula is invented, or, more frequently
a new set of facts is brought into subjection to
an old law. The theory must fit the facts; it
must be a complete and consistent description;
its terms must be either directly experimental,
or accessible to experimental tests; and it must
be impersonal to this extent, that it will appear
valid to all who can appreciate the evidence.

"The final touchstone," Prof. Karl Pearson
says, "is equal validity for all normally consti-
tuted minds." Moreover, the theory must be
compared with already established conclusions.
If there is any discrepancy between the new and

74 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

old, some reconsideration of the one or the other,
or of both, will be necessary.

Lord Kelvin was wont to emphasize the dis-
tinction between two stages of progress in science,
the "Natural History" stage and the "Natural
Philosophy" stage. In his introductory lecture
(1846) as Professor of Natural Philosophy in
Glasgow University — a lecture which he repeated
for over fifty years — he said: "In the progres-
sive study of natural phenomena, that is, the
phenomena of the external world, the first work
is to observe and classify facts; the process of
inductive generalization follows, in which the
laws of nature are the objects of research. These
two stages of science are designated by the ex-
pressions of natural history and natural philos-
ophy.'9 In other words, there is an observational
and descriptive stage, followed by generaliza-
tion and formulation.

It is necessary, then, to make a clear distinc-
tion between the raw materials of science and
the systematizations which raise these to a
higher power. As Prof. P. G. Tait once said:
"Descriptive botany, natural history, volumes
of astronomical observations, etc., are collec-
tions of statements, often facts, from which
scientific truth may ultimately be extracted, but
they are not science. Science begins to dawn,
but only to dawn, when a Copernicus, and after

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 75

him a Kepler or a Galilei, sets to work on these
raw materials, and sifts from them their essence.
She bursts into full daylight only when a Newton
extracts the quintessence. There has been, as
yet, but one Newton; there have not been very
many Keplers."

THE SCIENTIFIC USE OF THE IMAGINATION. —
This was the title of a famous lecture in which
Tyndall discussed with eloquence and insight the
function of imagination in scientific research.
" Bounded and conditioned by co-operant reason,"
he said, *" imagination becomes the mightiest in-
strument of the physical discoverer." "There is
in the human intellect a power of expansion, I
might almost call it a power of creation, which is
brought into play by simple brooding over facts,
'the spirit brooding over chaos.' '

It may be that the imaginative brooding sug-
gests a solution in some way that we do not at
present understand — life is essentially creative;
it may be that there is a more or less unconscious
cerebral experimenting; it is certain that letting
the mind play among facts has often led to
magnificent conclusions. It seems that the solu-
tion is often reached first and the proof supplied
afterwards. Newton spoke of reaching his dis-
coveries "by attending my mind thereunto,"
but it would be extremely interesting to know
more precisely what he meant. The steps by

76 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

which he reached his gravitation-formula illus-
trate an interlacing of induction and deduction,
but we must agree with Prof. Gotch that the
law was "the conception of a creative mind gifted
with imagination." "In the language of Tyndall,
this 'passage from a falling apple to a falling
moon' was a stupendous leap of the imagination,
for his enunciated law applies in conception to
the universe, thus extending into boundless space
and persisting through endless time."

At the beginning of this chapter we hinted
that all methods are transcended by men of gen-
ius, whose magnificent operations the history of
Science discloses. We cannot give a psychological
account of the way in which the greatest of them
made their discoveries. Their methods were
secondary. "God said, Let Newton be! and
there was light." Of Kelvin, his biographer
says: —

"Like Faraday, and the other great masters in
science, he was accustomed to let his thoughts
become so filled with the facts on which his atten-
tion was concentrated that the relations subsist-
ing between the various phenomena dawned upon
him, and he saw them as if by some process of
instinctive vision denied to others. It is the gift
of the seer. ..." "His imagination was vivid;
in his intense enthusiasm he seemed to be driven,
rather than to drive himself. The man was lost

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 77

in his subject, becoming as truly inspired as is
the artist in the act of creation."

What a famous mathematical teacher, Hop-
kins,, "who had had, perhaps, more experience
of mathematical minds than any man of his time,"
said of Clerk Maxwell, may also serve to illustrate
our point in regard to genius. His striking words
were: "It is not possible for that man to think
incorrectly on physical subjects."

In short, it must be admitted that genius
transcends methods. As Prof. Silvanus P.
Thompson says in his Life of Lord Kelvin: —

"Observation, experience, analysis, abstraction,
imagination, all these are necessary — but are they
all? Something seems yet wanting to account
for what we call the intuition of the master-mind.
It is surely more akin to the innate faculty of
the great artist than to the trained powers of the
analyst or the logician."

THE FUNDAMENTAL POSTULATE OF SCIENCE. —
There is one fundamental postulate underlying
scientific procedure, — a postulate which is verified
with every fresh step. It is the postulate of the
Uniformity of Nature. This, which may be ana-
lysed into a number of postulates, means that for
our human purposes there is stability in the
properties of things, that the same situations are
continually recurring, that there is a routine in
the order of Nature — a routine without gaps or

78 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

interpolations, in which every event is deter-
mined by antecedent events.

Clerk Maxwell discussed the Uniformity of
Nature in his famous Discourse on Molecules
(1873).

"In the heavens we discover by their light,
and by their light alone, stars so distant from
each other that no material thing can ever have
passed from one to another; and yet this light,
which is to us the sole evidence of the existence
of these distant worlds, tells us also that each
of them is built up of molecules of the same
kinds as those which we find on earth. A mole-
cule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius
or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in pre-
cisely the same time.

"Natural causes, as we know, are at work
which tend to modify, if they do not at length
destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions
of the earth and the whole solar system. But
though in the course of ages catastrophes have
occurred and may yet occur in the heavens,
though ancient systems may be dissolved and
new systems evolved out of their ruins, the mole-
cules out of which these systems are built — the
foundation-stones of the material universe — re-
main unbroken and unworn. They continue this
day as they were created — perfect in number and
measure and weight. . . »"

SCIENTIFIC METHOD 79

In the more exact sciences — such as astronomy
— the verification of the uniformity is complete,
since the routine of sequences can be summed
up in rigid mechanical formulae. We cannot
do this in Biology, yet here also we make and
verify the postulate of the Uniformity of Nature.
In spite of a strong personal element in many
living creatures which makes their behaviour in
complicated situations unpredictable, there are
uniformities both of action and reaction. With-
out these, indeed, there could not be a science
of Biology at all, but with these there is a basis
for calculation, prediction, and action, which is
reliable, though not to the same degree as that
afforded by the more exact sciences.

SUMMARY. — The logic of scientific discovery is
chiefly an intricate interlacing of induction and
deduction. While genius has counted for much in
the history of science, many great discoveries have
been the harvest of a keen eye and an inquisitive
spirit. The first step in scientific procedure is to
collect data, and all science begins with measure-
ment. The second step is the arrangement and
classification of facts. Auxiliary to this and to
formulation is the process of analysis or reduction
to simpler terms. In order to fulfil the aim of
describing facts of experience as exactly as possible,
as simply as possible, as completely as possible,
it is often necessary to try one hypothesis after

80 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

another. An important step in procedure is the
carrying out of test experiments. The final result
is a general formula or a law of Nature, or, more
frequently, the inclusion of a new set of facts within
an old law. At every step imagination counts and
its highest flights are called genius. The funda-
mental postulate of science is the Uniformity of
Nature.

CHAPTER IV

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES

"The divisions of the sciences are not like
different lines that meet in one angle, but rather
like the branches of trees that join in one
trunk." — BACON.

The Convenience and the Difficulties of Classification —
Bacon's Classification — Comte's Classification — Spencer's
Classification — Bain's Classification — Karl Pearson's Clas-
sification— Bio-physics — Exact Science — The Classifica-
tion Adopted — The Interest of the Classification of the
Sciences — The Correlation of the Sciences — Summary.

THE CONVENIENCE AND THE DIFFICULTIES
OF CLASSIFICATION. — Science takes the whole
known universe for its province, and every com-
municable verifiable fact of experience is included
among its data. This is such a large order that
it is obviously convenient to have some classi-
fication. Moreover, although there is nothing
but mis-education to hinder an intelligent citizen
from having a scientific interest in many different
orders of facts, tastes differ, and an intellectual
division of labour naturally arises. As a matter
of fact, the long discipline which every science
81

$2 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

requires renders it impossible for any ordinary
man to succeed in gaining a masterly familiarity
with more than one department of knowledge.

The classification of the sciences is a matter
of practical and intellectual convenience, but
it is full of difficulties and raises very deep ques-
tions. If it be made too detailed, there is the
risk of losing sight of the unity of knowledge;
if it be made too general, there is the risk of
denying to particular sciences that autonomy
which the distinctive character of their subject-
matter warrants. A compromise has to be made
between two desirabilities. It is plain, for in-
stance, that Botany and Zoology need not be
separated with great insistence; they may be
united without serious fallacy under the title
Biology. On the other hand, there are good rea-
sons for saying that it is a fallacy of the gravest
sort to include Biology as a special section of
Physics and Chemistry.

There are similar difficulties in teaching and
learning. Too great specialization leads to
pedantry; too little of it to superficiality. When
our aim is to get a grip of scientific method, we
are more likely to succeed by settling down to
the thorough study of some one order of facts,
than by indulging in an intellectual ramble
through the universe. On the other hand, when
we wish fresh points of view and new impulse

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 83

to the scientific imagination, we require width
of knowledge and contacts between different
disciplines.

There seems to be a peculiar fascination in
attempting to classify the sciences, and many
great intellects have puzzled over the problem.
Thus we find Huxley, at the age of seventeen,
writing: "I have for some time been pondering
over a classification of knowledge. My scheme
is to divide all knowledge in the first place into
two grand divisions: (1) Objective — that for
which a man is indebted to the external world;
and (2) Subjective — that which he has acquired
or may acquire by inward contemplation." He
proposed this scheme: —

SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE

Metaphysics

i II I

Metaphysics Maths. Logic Theology Morality History Physiology Physics
proper

There have been dozens of classifications of
the sciences, which have been dealt with in a
very learned way by the late Prof. Robert Flint,
but it is far from our purpose to discuss them
here. We shall not do more than refer to a few
which illustrate particular points.

BACON'S CLASSIFICATION. — In his "Intellec-
tual Globe," Francis Bacon (1561-1626) recog-
nized three big departments of human learning —

84 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

History, Poesy, and Philosophy or the Sciences.
History, based on Memory, was divided into
"Natural" and "Civil," a reminiscence of which
is found in the title "Natural and Civil History"
which was borne till lately by more than one
Scottish Professorship. Poesy was based on the
faculty of Imagination. Philosophy or the Sci-
ences, based on Reason, included Divinity, which
has to do with revelation, and Natural Phil-
osophy, which has to do with God, Nature,
and Man. The department dealing with Nature
included Mathematics, Physics (Material and
Secondary Causes), and Metaphysics (Form and
Final Causes). It is obvious that this classifica-
tion does not help us much to-day, but it is very
interesting, as Prof. Karl Pearson points out,
to notice the suggestion that the sciences are not
like different lines that meet in one angle, but
rather like branches of a tree that meet in one
stem, "which stem grows for some distance
entire and continuous before it divides itself
into arms and boughs." There is here a sug-
gestion at once of unity and of evolution.

Since the divisions of the sciences are "like
the branches of trees that join in one trunk,"
"it is first necessary that we constitute a univer-
sal science as a parent to the rest, and as making
a common road to the sciences before the ways
separate." This "universal science" was a

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 85

"primary or summary philosophy," and included
an inquiry into "transeendentals, or the adven-
titious conditions of beings." Bacon's scheme
formed the basis of the gigantic work of the
French Encyclopaedists, but they might well
have had a better. It was founded on a false
idea of Memory, Imagination, and Reason as
separate faculties, giving rise to separate depart-
ments of knowledge, and it is full of what seems
to us to-day to be extraordinary confusion, such
as the entire separation of History from Science,
and the separation of Man from Nature.

COMTE'S CLASSIFICATION. — Auguste Comte
(1798-1857) recognized six fundamental sciences:
Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry,
Biology, and Sociology; and a seventh supreme
or final science of Morals. These, he said, form
a linear series, indicative of the order of evolution,
for a relatively simple, abstract, and independent
science must, he maintained, always come before
the relatively more special, complex, and depen-
dent. There were two great ideas here, though
both were exaggerated. The first is, that the
sciences should contribute to the guidance of
human conduct, for in morals there is the "synthet-
ical terminus of the whole scientific construction."
In other words, Science should afford the broad
basis for the Art of Life. The second is, that the
sciences form a hierarchy, those that deal with

86 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the more complex orders of facts being dependent
on those that deal with less complex orders of
facts. It does not seem to us that the facts of
life can be re-stated in the formulae of chemistry
and physics, or that the biologist holds in his
hands the key to the problems of human society,
but it is certain that an understanding and also
a control of the organism has been greatly fur-
thered by chemical and physical inquiries, and
that the data of biology are full of suggestion
to the sociologist. Comte's insistence on the
inter-dependence and correlation of the sciences
was sound.

The idea of a linear series, however, is falla-
cious if taken literally. It does not express an
historical fact that Biology evolved or evolves
from Chemistry and Physics; Astronomy can-
not be separated off as a fundamental science
from Physics and Chemistry, nor did it supply
the foundations of Physics; Mathematics may be
justly called the most fundamental of the sciences,
but it is abstract and not in line with Physics,
Chemistry, and Biology, which are descriptive.
The ranking of Psychology as a department of
Physiology (Biology) abandons the autonomy of
that very distinctive science — quite gratuitously
and fallaciously, we venture to think.

SPENCER'S CLASSIFICATION. — Herbert Spencer
(1864) emphasized the distinction between the

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 87

Abstract Sciences of Logic and Mathematics,
which deal with modes or methods of scientific
description, and the Concrete Sciences which are
the scientific descriptions. Thus Mathematics
is obviously an abstract science, applicable to
all sorts of things, but never inquiring what sort
of things they are.

"The broadest natural division of the sciences
is, he affirmed, that between sciences which
deal with the abstract relations under which phe-
nomena are presented to us, and those which
deal with the phenomena themselves — between
sciences which deal with the mere blank forms of
existence, and those which deal with real ex-
istences" (Flint, 1904, p. 227). Among the lat-
ter, Spencer distinguished the Abstract-Concrete
Sciences, such as Mechanics, Physics, and Chem-
istry which treat of realities in their elements, or
of the real relations implicated in certain classes of
facts, and the Concrete Sciences, Astronomy, Geol-
ogy, Biology, Psychology, and Sociology, which
deal with realities in their totalities, or with
aggregates of phenomena.

"From the beginning," he says, "the Abstract
Sciences, the Abstract-Concrete Sciences, and the
Concrete Sciences have progressed together, the
first solving problems which the second and third
presented, and growing only by the solution of
the problems; and the second similarly growing

88 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

by joining the first in solving the problems of the
third. All along there has been a continuous
action and reaction between the three great classes
of sciences."

SPENCER'S SCHEME

Group I. Abstract Sciences: — LOGIC AND MATHEMATICS
Group II. Abstract-Concrete Sciences: — Mechanics, Phy-
sics, Chemistry

Group III. Concrete Sciences: — Astronomy, Geology, Biol-
ogy, Psychology, Sociology

"The three groups of Sciences may be briefly
defined as laws of the forms, laws of the factors,
laws of the products."

"The first, or Abstract group, is instrumental
with respect to both the others; and the second,
or Abstract-Concrete group, is instrumental with
respect to the third or Concrete group."

"The second and third groups supply subject-
matter to the first, and the third supplies subject-
matter to the second; but none of the truths
which constitute the third group are of any use
as solvents of the problems presented by the
second group; and none of the truths which the
second group formulates can act as solvents of
problems contained in the first group."

In this scheme, as Prof. Flint pointed out,
"Spencer would seem to have himself constructed
a series of sciences of the very kind which, in

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 89

opposition to Comte, he declared to be impossible.
Comte meant no more by calling one science
logically dependent on another than that the one
placed first is instrumental as regards the one
placed last, while the latter is not instrumental
as regards the former. If there be a number of
sciences dealing with fundamentally distinct
phenomena, and so related that every antecedent
is instrumental as regards every consequent, and
no consequent is instrumental as regards any
antecedent, a series of sciences is constituted
which represents the logical dependence of its
members. Spencer started with denying that
there was any such series, but ended by impli-
citly showing that there was one. His own clas-
sification, taken in connection with the passage
quoted, was a decisive refutation of what was
extreme in his own criticism of the Comtist
scheme. So far from having succeeded in over-
throwing that scheme he only at the utmost
succeeded in slightly modifying it.

"There is a logical dependence of the sciences.
And why? Just because there is a natural depen-
dence of phenomena. The quantitative relations
with which mathematics deals are more general
than the mechanical laws which physics brings
to light; there can be no chemical combinations
unconditioned by physical properties; vital func-
tions never appear apart from chemical processes;

90 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

and there must be life before there can be con-
sciousness. That remarkable hierarchy of phe-
nomena is a fact which a cloud of abstract lan-
guage or a covering of subtle reasoning may to
some extent and for a short while conceal from
our view, but which no language or reasoning can
efface or even long obscure. And there being
such a hierarchy of phenomena, it is scarcely
conceivable that there should be no correspond-
ing hierarchy of sciences" (Flint, 1904, p. 231).

We have quoted this strong opinion from an
authority who earned a high reputation in deal-
ing with philosophical questions, but it appears
to us to require some safeguarding — in one direc-
tion in particular, to which we have already
referred, and must refer yet again. There are,
of course, physical and chemical processes in the
living body; we may speak of the physics and
chemistry of organisms; but these do not con-
stitute biology, nor do they directly contribute
to the solution of biological problems, which
have primarily to do with the ways of living
creatures as such.

One of the features of Spencer's classification
which has been much criticized — and justly, as
it seems to us — is the awkward naming and
grouping of the "Abstract-Concrete" Sciences,
which included Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry
and Sciences of Light, Heat, Electricity, and

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 91

tgnetism. It is difficult to see why Mechanics
should be called "abstract-concrete," or why
the Sciences of Heat, Light, etc., are not included
under Physics, and so on.

BAIN'S CLASSIFICATION. — Prof. Alexander Bain
distinguished Fundamental (or Abstract) Sciences
from Dependent (or Concrete) Sciences, and in so
doing, apart from the nomenclature, he made
a distinct step of progress. It is evident that
Geography (one of the dependent sciences) is de-
rivative, complex, and particulate, as contrasted
with Physics (one of the fundamental sciences),
which is independent, simple, and general.

The fundamental sciences, according to Bain,
were Logic, Mathematics, Mechanics or Mechan-
ical Physics, Molecular Physics, Chemistry, Biol-
ogy, and Psychology. "In every one of these,"
he said, "there is a distinct department of phe-
nomena; taken together they comprehend all
known phenomena, and the order indicated is the
order from simple to complex, and from indepen-
dent to dependent, marking the order of study
and evolution." Taken collectively "they con-
tain the laws of every known process in the
world, whether of matter or of mind; and set
forth these laws in the order suitable for studying
and comprehending them to the greatest possible
advantage."

The dependent sciences include Mineralogy,

m INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

Meteorology, Geography, Botany, Zoology, Phi-
lology, and Sociology — the point in the definition
being that "no one of them involves any opera-
tion but what is expounded in the fundamental
or departmental sciences."

Thirdly, Bain suggested a third group of Prac-
tical Sciences, but here his usual clearness of
thought is less evident. For he includes within
one very elastic band no only what we now call
"Applied Sciences," but also some of the arts like
Architecture, and several sub-sciences like ^Es-
thetics (surely a division of Psychology), not to
speak of Ethics and Economics. The idea of his
third group was a good one but the contents
formed, as Flint says, "an artificial and hetero-
geneous conglomeration." The same authority
protests against the exclusion of Metaphysics and
Theology, a procedure common to Comte, Spencer,
and Bain; but concedes that as regards the classi-
fication of the Sciences properly so-called Bain's
Scheme "may well be regarded as an improve-
ment on Comte's and much superior to Spencer's."

KARL PEARSON'S CLASSIFICATION. — One of the
clearest of recent maps of knowledge is that
furnished by Prof. Karl Pearson in his Grammar
of Science. He distinguishes, to begin with, the
Abstract Sciences, which deal with modes of
discrimination, from the Concrete Sciences, which
deal with the contents of perception. The Ab-

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 93

stract Sciences include Logic and other "method-
ological " disciplines, and mathematics with its
many subdivisions including Statistics.

The Concrete Sciences include (1) the Phys-
ical Sciences, which deal with inorganic phe-
nomena, and (2) the Biological Sciences, which
deal with organic phenomena. The Physical
Sciences are divided by Pearson into the Precise
and the Synoptic, the latter always decreas-
ing as the former increase. Astronomy is in
greater part precise, meteorology is in greater part
synoptic. "In the one case we have not only a
rational classification of facts, but we have been
able to conceive a brief formula, the law of gravi-
tation, which accurately resumes these facts. We
have succeeded in constructing, by aid of ideal
particles, a conceptual mechanism which describes
astronomical changes. In the other case we may
or may not have reached a perfect classification
of facts, but we certainly have not been able to
formulate our perceptual experience in a mechan-
ism or conceptual motion, which would enable us
to precisely predict the future."

(1) THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES — those dealing
with Inorganic Phenomena — are divided by Pear-
son into the following: —

Precise Physical Sciences (reduced to ideal
motions) .

94 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

Physics of the Ether, e. g. dealing with Heat,
Light, Electricity, Magnetism.

Atomic Physics, e. g. Theoretical Chemistry,
Spectrum Analysis.

Molecular Physics, e. g. dealing with Elasticity,
Sound, Crystallography, Hydro-mechan-
ics, Theory of the Tides, Kinetic Theory
of Gases.

Molar Physics, e. g. Mechanics, Planetary The-
ory, Lunar Theory.

Synoptic Physical Sciences (not reduced to
ideal motions).

Chemistry, Mineralogy, Geology, Geography,
Meteorology, Inorganic Evolution of the
Earth and the Planetary System.

The Precise and the Synoptic Physical Sciences,
respectively, "correspond very closely to the phe-
nomena of which we have constructed a con-
ceptual model by aid of elementary corpuscles
having ideal motions, and to the phenomena
which have not been reduced to such a conceptual
description." . . . "Thus Synoptic Physical Sci-
ence is rather Precise Physical Science in the
making than qualitatively distinct from it. It
embraces large classifications of facts which we
are continually striving to resume in simple
formulae or laws, and, as usual, these laws are
laws of Motion. Thus considerable portions of

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 95

the Synoptic Physical Sciences are already precise,
or in process of becoming precise. This is notably
the case with Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy.

(2) THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES — those dealing
with Organic Phenomena — are divided by Pear-
son as follows: —

First, there are those branches of biological
science which deal with the spatial relations, or
the localization of living creatures. Here Pearson
includes the study of the Distribution of Living
Forms (C horology) and the study of habits in
relation to environment (Ecology). "These form
the major portion of what in the old sense was
termed Natural History." [Prof. Pearson's classi-
fication seems to us, in this instance, too hard
and fast. The distinctive feature of animal
behaviour is certainly not its spatial relation.]
Secondly, there are those branches of biological
science which deal with sequence in time — with
growth or change. The non-recurring phases are
called Evolution (of plants, animals, and man);
the recurring phases are called Growth. The
study of non-recurring growth is History; the
study of recurring growth is Biology in the nar-
rower sense. [This seems to us again too hard
and fast. Thus we do not think that the trans-
formation through variation and selection which is
at the heart of racial evolution, and the differen-
tiation and integration which are at the heart of

96 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

individual development, can be lumped in the
conception of Growth.]

Biology is further subdivided, by Pearson, into
three great divisions, according as it deals (a)
with form and structure (Morphology, Anatomy,
Histology, etc.) ; (6) with growth and reproduction
(the topics dealt with in the Evolution of Sex,
the Theory of Heredity, and Embryology); and
(c) with functions and actions, which may be
studied from the physical side (Physiology) or
from the mental side (Psychology). The branch
of Psychology which deals with men in the group
is Sociology, which falls into such branches as
the Science of Morals, the Science of Politics.
Political Economy, and Jurisprudence.

PEARSON'S SCHEME

(In outline only.)

ABSTRACT SCIENCE: — Logic. Mathematics, Sta-
tistics, Applied Mathematics, a cross-link
between Abstract and Concrete Science.

CONCRETE SCIENCE: — (1) The Physical Sciences
— including Precise Physical Sciences (Phys-
ics of the Ether, Atomic Physics, Molecu-
lar Physics, Molar Physics) and Synoptic
Physical Sciences (Chemistry, Mineralogy,
Geology, Geography, Meteorology, etc.).
(2) The Biological Sciences — including

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 97

Chorology and Ecology, Biology in the
narrower sense (the study of structure,
the study of growth and reproduction,
the study of functions, Psychology, and
Sociology, and finally History (including
the study of organic as well as human
evolution).

BIO-PHYSICS. — To his long list of sciences Prof.
Pearson would add another — a cross-link between
Physical and Biological Sciences — which he calls
Bio-physics. This science particularly excites our
interest, for in spite of its very shadowy nature
(even Pearson admitting that it "does not appear
to have advanced very far at present") the idea
of it is provocative and raises the kind of ques-
tion which makes the problem of classifying the
sciences of deep importance.

Prof. Pearson says that "life invariably occurs
associated with sense-impressions similar to those
of lifeless forms," and that "organisms appear
to have chemical and physical structure differing
only in complexity from inorganic forms." But
our impression is that the difference in complexity
has involved a difference in kind, such that the
interpretative formulae of the physical sciences
do not suffice for the description of the growth
and activities, the development and evolution of
organisms. Living creatures are historic beings,

98 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

and in studying them we have to do with behav-
iour quite different from the movements of lifeless
forms. Prof. Pearson continues: —

"Although we cannot definitely assert that life
is a mechanism, until we know more exactly what
we mean by the term mechanism as applied to
organic corpuscles, there still seems little doubt
that some of the generalizations of physics —
notably the great principle of the conservation of
energy — do describe at least part of our perceptual
experience of living organisms."

Admitting this, and the fact that there are
physical and chemical processes in the living body
which receive physical and chemical formulation,
we do not regard these as distinctive of the living
creature. Many of them, such as digestion, may
occur outside the living body altogether, in a
test-tube for instance. In short, we do not find
that a knowledge of these isolated items helps us
to describe hi physical terms the life and behav-
iour, the development and evolution of living
creatures.

According to Pearson, however, "a branch of
science is needed dealing with the application of
the laws of inorganic phenomena, or Physics, to
the development of organic forms. This branch
of science which endeavours to show that the
facts of Biology — of Morphology, Embryology, and
Physiology — constitute particular cases of general

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 99

physical laws has been termed Etiology. It would
be perhaps better to call it Bio-physics."

But the term Etiology is already in recognized
use for a biological inquiry into the factors in
organic evolution, such as variation and heredity,
selection and isolation, and it will remain a sound
branch of the biological tree even though no
success rewards the attempt to describe evolution
in terms of the laws of physics.

Prof. Pearson's idea is different. Just as
Applied Mathematics is "the process of analysing
inorganic phenomena by aid of ideal elementary
motions," and thus links Abstract to Concrete
Science, so Bio-physics attempts to link the
Physical and Biological Sciences together.

Pearson presents this view in a scheme: —

Applied [ABSTRACT SCIENCE

Mathematics \

— a cross-link I CONCRETE SCIENCE

PHYSICS BIOLOGY

— - y

Bio-physics — a cross-link

"Applied Mathematics and Bio-physics are thus
the two links between the three great divisions of

100 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

Science, and only when their work has been fully
accomplished shall we be able to realize von
Helmholtz's prediction and conceive all scientific
formulae, all natural laws, as laws of motion.
This goal we must, however, admit is at present
indefinitely distant."

Not only so, but as the only Bio-physics we
know of is the physical and chemical study of
various processes that occur in organisms, and
as no vital function whatever has yet been re-
described in bio-physical terms, and as the
results of bio-physical analysis do not seem to
help us to understand the growth and activities,
the development and evolution of living creatures
which require interpretations different in kind
from those of Physics — we are of opinion that
Bio-physics might be completed without Biology
having more than begun.

It is greatly to be regretted that an elaborate
and vividly clear classification of the sciences by
Prof. Patrick Geddes has not yet been published,
and therefore cannot be included here, though
the most convincing one we know. Some indica-
tion of it may be obtained from the following
scheme of anthropological studies published in
1903 by Prof. A. C. Haddon, for which he was
largely indebted to Prof. Geddes: —

EXACT SCIENCE. — We have seen that Prof.
Karl Pearson has distinguished Precise Physical

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 101

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102 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

Sciences from Synoptic Physical Sciences. In the
former, such as Molar and Molecular Physics,
the processes can be described in terms of ideal
motions; in the latter, such as Chemistry and
Geology, this can be done only in part. But
portions of the Synoptic Sciences are always
passing into the Precise Sciences.

The term "Exact Science" may be used more
generally to indicate all science that has resolutely
begun to "measure," including in "measurement"
all forms of precise registration. Not a little of
the modern work in pyschology is very exact,
but the description of its subject-matter "in
terms of ideal motions" is certainly not its
end.

In further illustration, let us ask why we hesi-
tate in applying to Biology the term "Exact
Science" which we unhesitatingly accord to
Astronomy. The reasons are two> — intrinsic and
extrinsic. The intrinsic reason is that Biology
deals with living creatures, which are personal
agents, variable and spontaneous, always to some
extent unpredictable. We deal in Biology with
an order of phenomena more complex than in
Astronomy, and our knowledge is proportionately
lacking in exactness.

The extrinsic reason is that Biology is a young
science and Astronomy a very old one. The
Astronomer is a master-workman, the Biologist

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 103

still only an apprentice. In a lecture on Inher-
itance, the late Prof. W. F. R. Weldon put this
matter very clearly: "The ideal description of
every experience, the description which alone
makes further progress possible, is a description
of all the results obtained, and not a statement
which largely ignores the inconsistencies observed.
The reason why astronomers, and physicists,
and chemists can so often afford to neglect the
inconsistencies of their experience without making
themselves ridiculous is that by great labour
they have already succeeded in confining the
limits within which these inconsistencies occur,
so that the proportion of the whole experience
affected by them is very small. But biologists
have not yet advanced so far as this: The margin
of uncertainty in their experience is still so large
that they are obliged to take account of it in
every statement they make."

Yet the work which Prof. Weldon himself
did in connection with variation, heredity, and
selection was symptomatic of the movement
towards exactness that has recently character-
ized even the most difficult departments of
Biology, those dealing with Evolution. There
has been for a long time much exact science in
comparative anatomy and physiology, but in
recent years the labours of the biometricians on
the one hand, and of the experimental zoologists

104 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

on the other, have done much to bring the study
of evolution-problems nearer the ideal of exact
science.

CLASSIFICATION ADOPTED. — Combining what
appear to us to be the chief merits of the fore-
going classifications, we propose the following
map: —

A. ABSTRACT, FORMAL, or METHODOLOGICAL
SCIENCES.

These deal with methods of inference, supply
intellectual instruments for investigation, and
test the consistency and completeness of scien-
tific descriptions.

MATHEMATICS, including STATISTICS.
LOGIC, in the widest sense.
METAPHYSICS.

B. CONCRETE, DESCRIPTIVE, or EXPERIEN-
TIAL SCIENCES.

These deal with the facts of experience and
with inferences from these facts. They include
five general or fundamental sciences and a large
number of particulate or derivative sciences.

B. 1. The five great fundamental sciences
are: —

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 105

SOCIOLOGY

PSYCHOLOGY

BIOLOGY

PHYSICS

CHEMISTRY

ANIMATE ORDER

PURELY PHYSICAL
ORDER

SOCIOLOGY is the science of the structure and
life, growth and evolution of societary
forms or social groups.

PSYCHOLOGY is the science of the subjective
aspect of behaviour, of Man and of animals.
In the human sphere Psychology has
the fascinating distinction, as compared
with other sciences, that "the instruments
of investigation are also the objects of
research."

BIOLOGY is the science of the structure and
activity, development and evolution of
organisms, including Man.

PHYSICS is mainly the science of the transfor-
mations of Energy (Energetics).

CHEMISTRY is mainly the science of the differ-
ent kinds of matter, their transformations,
affinities, and interactions. It is par ex-
cellence the science of molecules and atoms.

106 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

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CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 107

It must be admitted that the fields of chemistry
and physics are not separated by any defensible
boundary-lines, and the two sciences obviously
come together in such studies as spectrum anal-
ysis and in such theories as the electric struc-
ture of the atom. But the distinction is one
of considerable convenience and will probably
last.

Some would have even more doubt as to the
propriety of separating off Sociology, from Psy-
chology for instance.

The fact is that Sociology is still a very young
science; its scope and definition are in its own
hands. It is therefore neither necessary nor
advisable at present to try to define it with pre-
cision; we must see first how far it can go. It
is the scientific study of social groups or "societary
forms," considered as concrete organic unities, —
each of them more than the sum of its parts. It
necessarily comes into contact with anthropology
and history, with economics (which has primarily
to do with industrial organization), and with
politics (which has primarily to do with the
affairs of the state as such), but it has a place
and function of its own.

B. 2. The most important derivative or partic-
ulate sciences may be arranged in groups, depen-
dent on the five fundamental sciences. Two
points have to be kept clearly in mind, and may

108 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

be best illustrated by examples, (a) While the
general or fundamental science of Biology is not
concerned with the kinds of Plants or Animals, the
particulate or derivative sciences of Botany and
Zoology emphatically are. (fc) Many of the de-
rivative sciences are complex or synthetic, Anthro-
pology being a good example. They combine
the methods and concepts of several of the funda-
mental sciences for their own particular purposes.
Thus, to take another case, Geology is a synthetic
science, the focussing of several sciences in the
study of the Earth. It inquires into the struc-
ture, activities, and history of the Earth, which
it conveniently divides into four shells — each, if
we like, with its special science — the atmosphere,
the hydrosphere or oceans, the lithosphere or
crust, and the centrosphere or nucleus. For the
most part, perhaps, geologists are concerned with
the earth's crust, but there are few of them who
would consent to be restricted to this territory.
As Prof. R. S. Woodward says: "Geology illus-
trates better than any other science, probably,
the wide ramifications and the close inter-relations
of physical phenomena. There is scarcely a
process, a product, or a principle in the whole
range of physical science, from physics and
chemistry up to astronomy and astrophysics,
which is not fully illustrated in its uniqueness
and in its diversity by actual operations still in

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 109

progress on the earth, or by actual records pre-
served in her crust. The earth is thus at once
the grandest of laboratories and the grandest of
museums available to man."

Another idea which seems useful is that of
sub-sciences, as distinguished from special sci-
ences. Let us explain with reference to Biology.
(i.) A general or fundamental science is distin-
guished partly by its subject-matter, e. g. living
organisms; and partly by its point of view, which,
in the case of Biology, for instance, is not the
physico-chemical point of view. A general
science has a well-defined subject-matter to which
it applies characteristic methods and concepts.
Furthermore, it is concerned with general ques-
tions and not with particular descriptions. Biol-
ogy is concerned with what is common to all
living creatures, and with averages, not individuals.

(ii.) But under the rubric of Biology we have
the special, participate, or derivative sciences of
Botany and Zoology, which divide the world of
organisms between them and are both concerned
with particular description as well as with general
formulation. It might also be convenient to
have a special science of Protistology for the
minute and simple organisms which seem to
hesitate between plant and animal life. And
other special sciences may be recognized if de-
sired. It is all a matter of convenience.

110 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

(iii.) But within the general science of Biology
several quite different questions are asked, and
the answers to these are the sub-sciences. The
questions that the biologist must ask and answer
before he can go far in generalization appear
at first sight to be very numerous and varied,
but, from a certain distance, we see that there
are only four: What is this living creature as
regards form and structure? How does it work?
Whence has it arisen? How has it come to be
as it is?

(1) What is this in form and structure, in
symmetry and internal architecture? It seems
a "simple question," but how hard to answer, as
we press it farther and farther home, as we pass
from external features to internal structure,
from organs to tissues, from tissues to cells, as
we put one lens after another in front of our own,
as we call to our aid all sorts of devices — scalpel
and forceps, razor and microtome, fixative and
stain! "What is this," we say, "in itself and in
all its parts? what is this by itself and when com-
pared with its fellows and kindred? " and our
answer broadens and deepens till it furnishes the
raw materials of the sub-science of morphology.

(2) Close upon the first question — What is
this? there rises a second — How does this work?
"It is equally natural and necessary, and through-
out the progressive periods in the history of Biol-

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 111

ogy the two questions have never been far apart.
They have evolved together, especially during
the last hundred years, prompting one another
to a more and more penetrating inquisitiveness.
The key-word of the one is structure, or organ-
ization; the key- word of the other is function, or
activity. The creature which our first ques-
tion killed and picked to pieces has to be put
together again and made to work! What does
it do? how does it do it? how does it go? how
does it keep agoing? how does it set other creatures
like itself agoing? how long can it go? how does
it cease from going? In other words, how does
the organism feel and move? how does it grow
and multiply? how does it waste, recover itself,
and finally, in most cases, die? Above all, what
is the secret of its activity and of its power of
effective response to the changeful order of
nature? " (Darwinism and Human Life, 1909,
p. 8.) The attempts to answer these and
similar questions have made the science of
Physiology.

Physiology is the science of the activity of
organisms. It is the study of the working of
living things. It considers plants and animals
and man in their dynamic relations, just as
morphology considers them statically. It takes
to do with habit and function, just as morphology
takes to do with form and structure. And the

118 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

two sister sciences go hand in hand, for just as
taking a watch to pieces is not very intelligent
unless we inquire into the working of the various
parts, and just as we cannot understand how the
watch "goes" unless we know its structure inti-
mately, so anatomy and physiology must always
be closely linked together.

There has been a close parallelism in the history
of the two sciences. The morphologist began
with the form of the intact organism, and passed
in succession to the various organs, their com-
ponent tissue, their component cells, and, finally,
to the structure of living matter itself. So
the physiologist investigates life or activity at
different levels, passing from his study of the
living creature as a unity with certain habits,
to consider it as an engine of organs, as an
intricate web of tissues, as a veritable com-
munity of cells, and, finally, as a whirlpool of
living matter.

(3) The third question — Whence is this? is
really double, for we may inquire into the devel-
opment of the individual (Embryology) or into
the history of the race as it is hidden in the
strange graveyards of the buried past, the fossil-
bearing rocks (Palaeontology). Since these are
both historical or genetic inquiries, the one deal-
ing with individual development (ontogeny), the
other with racial evolution (phylogeny), it would

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 113

be useful to have one word like "geneology"
(altering a letter in genealogy) to cover them
both.

(4) There remains a fourth question, since
Darwin's day asked with a new hopefulness —
How have these living creatures come to be as
they are? What are the originative and what
the directive factors in evolution? How has the
raw material of progress, which we call variations,
been made available throughout the countless
ages? and how has this raw material been fash-
ioned to shape and use in improved adaptations
and endless new departures? The attempts to
answer these and similar questions are laying
the foundation-stones of the young sub-science
of ^Etiology.

The primary sub-sciences of Biology are thus
four: —

Morphology, the study of static relations, of

form and structure.
Physiology, the study of dynamic relations, of

habit and function.
Geneology, the study of development or of

individual becoming (Embryology), or of

the rock-recorded facts of racial history

(Palaeontology).
^Etiology, the study of the factors in racial

evolution.

114 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

It is evident that these sub-sciences of Biology
appear also as particular questions or methods
of the special sciences of Botany and Zoology.

BIOLOGY

GENEOLOGY

MORPHOLOGY

PHYSIOLOGY

ETIOLOGY

For purposes of convenience it seems well to
retain the term "Applied Science" for any de-
partment of a "Special Science" which has
directly to do with the arts and crafts. Thus, to
take a familiar illustration, a great part of "Med-
ical Science" is "Applied Science" definitely ori-
entated in relation to the art of healing. This
"Medical Science" is, or may be, just as scien-
tific as anything else; it is so in direct pro-
portion to the soundness of its foundations in
Anatomy, Physiology, Biology, Chemistry, and
the like, and in direct proportion to its own scien-
tific industry, but not even its most enthusi-
astic devotees will maintain that it aims directly
at adding to the sciences on which it is based.
It does so illustriously, it is true, but incidentally,
and it is a fine example of what we may legiti-
mately call an "Applied Science."

Another very clear example is "Agricultural
Science," which is orientated in relation to farm-
ing, gardening, shepherding, and the like. It is,

.

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 115

or may be, just as scientific as any other depart-
ment; it is so in direct proportion to the sound-
ness of its scientific foundations in Chemistry,
Botany, Zoology, Geology, Biology, and the
like, and in direct proportion to its own scientific
industry, but not even its most enthusiastic
devotees will maintain that it aims directly at
adding to the sciences on which it is based. It
has begun to repay its debts, but not deliberately.
It is a fine example of an "Applied Science."

Many other examples might be given, such as
the Science of Education and the Science of
Engineering, both of which appear to us to be
"Applied Sciences," intermediate between a
general or a particulate science (a "pure science")
on the one hand and one of the Arts or Crafts
on the other. Their obviously distinctive feature
is that they contain a large body of knowledge
definitely orientated towards a practical purpose.

THE INTEREST OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF
THE SCIENCES. — It may seem to some that, for a
small book of this sort, too much space has
been given to a very "academic" question, — that
of the classification of the sciences. But may
we briefly indicate its real interest, (a) Perhaps
it does not matter very much which classification
is adopted, the important thing is to have in the
mind some classification which one has made one's
own. It is not merely that we should put our

110 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

intellectual house in order — 3, process that tends
to clear thinking, but to have a vividly real
scheme or map of knowledge is to have a sort of
Philosopher's Stone. It adds to the value of
our knowledge by always suggesting inter-rela-
tions and by serving as a test of completeness
and consistency. We all need to be constantly
reminded of Plato's demand that the true lover
of science shall be interested in the whole of his
subject.

(b) The second great interest of the classifica-
tion of the sciences is that it raises the largest
and deepest questions. Willy-nilly it expresses
a Philosophy. Its boundary-lines express our
conclusions as to the autonomy or the depen-
dence of Biology and of Psychology, our decisions
on the difficult questions of Vitalism and Materi-
alism. It is not a matter of indifference whether
Sociology should be reckoned as a general science
(Comte) or as a branch of Biology (Pearson). It is
not by a misprint that we have placed Metaphys-
ics beside Mathematics as an Abstract Science.

As we think over the conflicting classifications
of the sciences, we see that a frequent cause of
confusion has been the attempt to map out
territories as preserves of particular sciences.
This implies a wrong idea of the constitution of a
science, which is defined not by its subject-matter,
but by the categories under which it thinks of

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 117

that subject-matter. Two sciences may work
and often do work at the same material, — but with
different ends in view, with different fundamental
concepts, and with methods different in detail.

Let us illustrate. An anthropologist may work
for years at a particular societary form, and
yet his results may be contributions to biology
rather than to sociology. A psychologist may
devote himself to the study of cats and dogs, and
yet his results may not be contributions to biology
in the stricter sense. A physicist may give per-
sistent and profitable attention to the electrical
changes associated with contracting muscle, and
yet though he is in a sense dealing with organisms
all the time, his results may be contributions to
physics rather than to biology. Similarly, the
chemist, for purposes of his own, may give his
life to the study of the odoriferous substances in
flowers, and yet never ask one biological question.

THE CORRELATION OF THE SCIENCES. — From
the classification of the sciences and sub-sciences
we turn with a feeling of relief to the idea of
their Unity. Blocked apart for practical con-
venience, treated of in separate books, expounded
by different teachers, investigated in different
laboratories, the sciences are, after all, parts of
one discipline, illustrations of one method, at-
tempts to make clear — if never to solve — the one
great problem of the Order of Nature. They

118 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

form, or should form, one body of truth, and they
gain in value the more they are correlated. This
is the ideal alike of the Philosopher's Stone, of
the Encyclopaedia, of the University, and of the
most modern scientific synthesis. Let us briefly
consider it from various points of view.

When we think of a living creature with vivid-
ness, several major impressions stand out clearly
in the mind. In the first place, the organism is a
unity. It has many members, but one body;
many activities, but one life. It develops and
grows and varies and acts as a unity. Therefore,
we feel sure that while it has to be made the sub-
ject of many different sciences, — anatomy, physi-
ology, embryology, not to speak of chemistry
and physics, and not forgetting psychology, the
scientific truth about the living creature cannot
be reached unless the results of the various
scientific inquiries are pooled, and unless the
fundamental fact of the unity of the organism
is recognized.

In the second place, the living creature cannot
be isolated or studied in vacuo. It has an inani-
mate environment from which it is scientifically
inseparable, and it sends its tendrils into the
lives of many other creatures. If we are to come
nearer knowing the truth about the living creature,
we must study it in its inter-relations. But that
involves the convergence of many sciences, which

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 119

approach their ideal completeness in proportion
as they are correlated.

In the third place, we have to bear in mind
that the living creature is passing by as one of a
great historical pageant. It is an heir of the ages,
only to be understood as the resultant of num-
berless factors — mechanical, chemical, physical,
and animate — which have gone to its shaping.
It has gathered into itself the sunshine and haar,
the wind and the rain of millennia. It requires
a unity of the sciences if it is to be understood.
Nor is it merely a passer-by in a great procession,
which we can study all too briefly before the
torch it carries goes out and it fades away, it is
an individualized phase in the ceaseless circula-
tion of matter and energy. To change the meta-
phor again, it is a whirlpool in the river of time.
All of which makes us feel that the sciences are
most scientific when they are most united. The
higher the subject in the scale of being the more
obvious this is, for Man most of all, but even in
regard to the non-living the inter-relatedness of
things makes a unification of sciences necessary.
Who, for instance, can understand the earth as
it is apart from its living tenants? The very
dust throbs with life.

The idea which we wish to illustrate is very
plain when we think of some big problem such
as the physiology of marine organisms — and the

120 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

improvement of fisheries as an application of
this. The only hope of getting towards an under-
standing of such a subject is through the com-
bined efforts of chemist and physicist, botanist
and zoologist, meteorologist and geographer.

Worthy of note in this connection is the
unthought-out objection which some ultra-con-
servative educationists bring against geography,
that it is not a well-defined single science, but a
combination of many sciences for a particular
purpose. The description is correct that Geog-
raphy is a circle cutting many other circles, but
this is precisely its peculiar scientific merit and
virtue, that it expresses a unification or synthesis
of complementary disciplines.

Our intellectual outlook on the world depends
on our scientific culture, and its value must vary
with the all-roundness and with the correlation
of different scientific disciplines. Just as it takes
many different rays of light to make sunshine, so
it takes many different sciences to give that
synthetic view which we call sanity. Thus we
stand in unwearying admiration before Goethe
because his outlook was at once physical and
biological, geographic and psychic.

It is idle to pretend that the outlook on the
order of nature which becomes habitual to the
student of mechanics has nothing to gain from,
let us say, the very different impressions that

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 121

reward those who devote themselves to compara-
tive psychology. It savours of what we may call
scientific Chauvinism to maintain that physico-
chemical interpretations, when they go to the
formation of our outlook on Nature, require
no corrective from the biological, mental, and
social sciences. It requires a long-necked ob-
server to see the whole firmament out of one
window.

We know how chemistry assists in physiolog-
ical inquiry; showing how this and that chemical
process occurs in the body, here an oxidation
and there a reduction, now a hydrolysis and
again a fermentation, thereby bringing into
stronger relief the co-ordination and control of all
these, which is distinctively vital. But we have
also to notice how physiology assists chemistry, —
a noteworthy instance being the physiological
discovery of oxygen by Mayow (1674) a century
before the element was chemically isolated.

The point that we wish to get perfectly clear
is this, that the same phenomenon may be con-
sidered without irrelevancy under several sciences.
Thus when we enjoy looking at a rose, there are
chemical, physical, physiological, and psycholog-
ical problems involved. At least four sciences
have something to say, and what must be realized
is that while these sciences are separated off for
purposes of human convenience, because they

INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

pursue different methods, use different tools,
sum up in different kinds of formulae, they are
simply different modes of one rational inquiry.

SUMMARY. — The classification of the sciences is
in detail a matter of convenience, but it is of great
practical importance to have in the mind some
clear map of knowledge. The broad lines of the
classification depend upon our scientific and phil-
osophical convictions, e. g. as to the independence of
Biology and the separateness of Psychology from
Physiology. It seems useful to separate, first of all,
the abstract sciences which are "methodological,"
from the concrete sciences which deal with the facts
of experience. The fundamental abstract science is
Mathematics, and we would regard Metaphysics as
supreme in the same division. The five great con-
crete sciences, which may also be called descriptive
or experiential, are: Chemistry, Physics, Biology,
Psychology, and Sociology. Within these there are
sub-sciences, — thus Biology is divisible into Mor-
phology, Physiology, Geneology (i. e. Embryology
and Paleontology) and JEtiology. Dependent on
the five general sciences are the numerous derivative
or particulate sciences, such as Botany and Zoology.
Many of these are complex or -synthetic, focussing
several sciences on one subject: Geology and
Geography are good examples. The term "applied
science" is conveniently used for those departments
of general or special sciences which have directly to

CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES 1£3

do with the development and evolution of human
life, or the arts and crafts. It is a matter for dis-
cussion whether there is only one science of Nature
or whether it is truer to say that there are several,
but all are agreed that the value and the progressive-
ness of the sciences depends in part on the degree
of their correlation.

CHAPTER V

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

"Truth is on a curve whose asymptote our
spirit follows eternally." — LEO ERRERA.

The Aims of Science and Philosophy — Twofold Relation be-
tween Science and Philosophy — Limitations of the Scientific
Account of Things — Problems before which Science and
Philosophy Meet — Origin of Living Creatures upon the
Earth — The Secret of the Organism — An Illustration —
The Soul and Body Problem — A Question — Summary.

THE AIMS OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. —
In this little book we have emphasized the view
of many modern thinkers, that it is the chief
business of the experimental sciences, whether
physical or psychical, to discover "descriptive
formulae by the aid of which the various processes
which make up the physical and psychical orders
may be depicted and calculated." The aim of
science is descriptive formulation; let us ask of
the philosophers how their inquiry is related to
ours.

Prof. A. E. Taylor, to whose Elements of
Metaphysics I owe a debt of obligation which I

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 125

very gratefully acknowledge, states the differ-
ence between Science and Philosophy as follows : —
"The work of the Philosophy of Nature and of
Mind only begins where that of the experimental
sciences leaves off. Its data are not particular
facts, as directly amassed by experiment and
observation, but the hypotheses used by experi-
mental science for the co-ordination and de-
scription of those facts. And it examines these
hypotheses, not with the object of modifying their
structure so as to include new facts, or to include
the old facts in a simpler form, but purely for the
purpose of estimating their value as an account of
ultimately real existence. Whether the hypoth-
eses are adequate as implements for the calcu-
lation of natural processes is a question which
Philosophy, when it understands its place, leaves
entirely to the special sciences; whether they can
claim to be more than useful formulae for calcu-
lation, i. e. whether they give us knowledge of
ultimate Reality, is a problem which can only be
dealt with by the science which systematically
analyses the meaning of reality, i. e. by Meta-
physics. We may perhaps follow the usage of
some recent writers in marking this difference of
object by a difference in terminology, and say
that the goal of experimental science is the De-
scription of facts, the goal of Metaphysics their
Interpretation. The difference of aim is, how-

126 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

ever, not ultimate. Description of facts, when
once we cease to be content with such description
as will subserve the purpose of calculation and
call for description of the fact as it really is, of
itself becomes metaphysical interpretation."

We have seen that one of the aims of science
is to distinguish what "seems" from what "is,"
and to do so generally, not particularly, is the
chief task of metaphysics. "Metaphysics sets
itself more systematically and universally than
any other science, to ask what, after all, is meant
by being real, and to what degree our various
scientific and non-scientific theories about the
world are in harmony with the universal charac-
teristics of real existence. Hence, Metaphysics
has been called "an attempt to become aware of
and to doubt all preconceptions"; and again, "an
unusually resolute effort to think consistently."

Something is always going wrong, however,
when the boundaries between different disci-
plines begin to appear static, like stone walls. The
various disciplines are like the functions of an
organism, which work into one another's hands,
being complementary. Pigeon-holing is simply
a device, part of our intellectual division of labour.
Science is an intellectual inquiry with definite
purposes — e. g. of discovering uniformities of
sequence, and with definite limitations, such as
that of not inquiring into the larger significance

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 127

of its results. But it often strains at its self-made
leash.

Let us take an example. It is the business of
the zoological evolutionist to discover what he
can in regard to the actual history of the various
races of animals. He has to discover, for instance,
if he can, the pedigree of Mammals. But his
task does not end there, he has to inquire into the
factors operative in this evolution — arguing back
from what is known of the laws of variation and
heredity, selection and isolation. But the more
complete his description becomes, the more inevi-
tably, as it seems to us, is he led towards reflec-
tion on the evolution of Mammals as a particular
chapter in a great book. It cannot be torn out
and understood by itself. It came about after
preparations that we dimly descry being made in
the mist of millions of years ago. It came about
in a natural, predetermined fashion, and at a
particular stage in the history of other things,
such as the Earth itself. Moreover, it was part
of the preparation for the Supreme Mammal —
Man himself. The evolution of Mammals, along
with the august process of which it was a part,
must here be seen in its larger significance — it
led on even to the science which, in pursuing
this thought, transcends itself.

TWOFOLD RELATION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND
PHILOSOPHY. — (1) Those who take life easily,

1£8 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

sailing their intellectual craft in the lea of their
particular shore of well-ascertained fact, are apt
to see things in the clearness of a false simplicity.
Science has come to know, they tell us, the ins
and outs of the stuff the world is made of — Matter,
which is built up of molecules, which are composed
of atoms, which consist of corpuscles or electrons.
And Science has also come to know, they tell us,
the power that is resident in the world — Energy,
whose measure is Force. It is a power of doing
work, which is always passing from form to form
without any loss or any gain. Give us Matter
and Energy, they say, and we will make a world
out of them. Just as the chemist can build up
urea and sugar and indigo from simple substances,
so Nature long ago, in some unknown hotbed,
made a synthesis of proteids which combined to
form small viable organisms. These multiplied,
and spread themselves, and varied under the stim-
uli of new surroundings. Given Variations and
plenty of time, Selection and Isolation can do
the rest. And just as consciousness emerges at
an uncertain stage in the development of the
individual egg-cell, so in the history of animal
organisms there was an evolution of mind. Now,
far be it from us to say that there is not consider-
able truth in this description of what may have
occurred, but it is certainly far too facile and
easy-going. It slurs over gigantic difficulties and

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 129

abounds in equally large assumptions. It may
be criticized first scientifically, and that is well;
what remains may then be criticized philosophi-
cally, which is, for developing a fit and proper
frame of mind, still better.

Now we have in Metaphysics a critical disci-
pline in consistent thinking; it has an ideal of
complete explanation; and it is able to test
scientific theories with reference to this ideal
formal standard. In this sense Metaphysics
functions as a sublime Logic, testing the com-
pleteness and consistency of our scientific descrip-
tions, whether of things as they are, or of the way
in which they have come to be, and it is desirable
for the sake of Science that it should be used*
The account that a Science gives of part of the
world must be not only self-consistent, and con-
gruent with the results of other sciences, it must
also submit to the formal requirements of meta-
physics. This criticism of categories and sy sterna-
tizations is the chief service that Metaphysics has
to render to science.

From this point of view, Philosophy has been
called "scientia scientiarum" — "a science which
determines the principles and conditions, the
limits and relations of the sciences." But to this
claim vigorous objections have been raised. For
it is the strong opinion of many who have made
great contributions to science, that the scientific

INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

Savestigator has no right to waive the responsi-
BHity of determining "the principles and condi-
tions, the limits and relations, of the sciences."
If he cannot determine these, who can? Now it
may be that the definition quoted is an unfortu-
nate one, and the objection not without justifica-
tion, but the important point is this, that the
categories and systematizations of science should
Be criticized, and this requires expert training.
If can only be done by a philosopher to whom
the scientific discipline is real, or by a scientific
investigator to whom the philosophical discipline
®r real. But it has to be done.

When a well-thought-out scientific exposition
disturbs the reader's preconceptions, or takes him
Beyond his usual depth of analysis, he has his
revenge in dubbing it "metaphysical." But this
is an ignorant sneer, if metaphysics means "the
critical and systematic analysis of our concep-
tions." It is an intellectual discipline, an actively
sceptical inquiry, a criticism of categories — and it
may be ranked beside Mathematics and Logic in
the general scheme of knowledge.

(2) The various sciences supply partial pictures
ef the world — pictures taken from different points
of view. It is for metaphysics to combine these
pictures, not as one makes a composite photo-
graph by placing one print on the top of another,
but rather as one combines two views in a stereo-

.

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 131

scope. In its constructive function metaphysics
aims at an all-round and consistent view of the
whole system, and it reaches this, or should reach
this, not in an a priori fashion, but by taking
account of the raw material which the sciences
furnish. In this way Science contributes to Meta-
physics.

If Metaphysics does not intrude into the prov-
ince of any particular science, and if it is not
another name for a synthesis of the sciences, what
is its province? All thinking has to do with facts
of experience, and these form the subject-matter
of the sciences. Where, then, does Metaphysics
come in? The answer that will suffice for our
purpose in this volume is simple enough: that
Metaphysics seeks to discover the general condi-
tions of giving a complete and consistent formu-
lation of experience — a formulation which has its
foundations in the sciences, but transcends them
in an attempt to answer imperious questions
which Science does not even ask.

For most men it is quite impossible to remain
satisfied with the systematic descriptions which,
science supplies, they have to go on to form
"some coherent conception of the scheme of
things to which they belong," and in this they
necessarily become metaphysical. Now it seems
good sense that they should try to do this con-
sciously and not at random, using the experience

132 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

of the ancient science of mental construction
whose foundations were laid by Aristotle. Science
brings in great wealth of raw material, but the
architectural genius must be sought in Philosophy.

LIMITATIONS OF THE SCIENTIFIC ACCOUNT OF
THINGS. — The plain man's question is, Can you
give an account of this? What is this modern
modesty of science, that it does not pretend to
explain anything? Can you give an account of
these phenomena or can you not? Let us consider
the limitations of the scientific account of things.

Science shows, often after much study, that a
certain collocation of antecedents and no other
will result in a certain collocation of consequents
and no other. But the consequents are often very
different from the antecedents, and we cannot
say that we know how they come about. Even
In an exact science like Chemistry this limitation
©f scientific description is well illustrated. We
know that oxygen and hydrogen unite under
certain conditions to form something qualitatively
very different from either of them, viz. water, but
we do not know how it is that water results.
Even in more complex cases, we know the condi-
tions of the combination, and we have ingenious
theories as to how the elements involved change
partners and form new linkages, but we do not
really understand how the result should be as it is.
Still less can we predict what will ensue from the

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 13S

previously untried combination of two highly
complex substances. It is like an untried experi-
ment in Heredity.

It comes to this: that the only cases in which
we can say that our scientific account is complete
and absolutely satisfactory, are cases of mechan-
ics— most beautifully in Gravitational Astronomy
— where the resultant is just a new form of the
components. Then only can we say with a clear
intellectual conscience, "Causa sequat effectum."
Science is continually showing that one particular
collocation of matter and energy passes into
another, but when the chains of sequence that it
chronicles are intricate it is no longer plain that
the resultant must be as it is and not otherwise.

Again, the terms of scientific interpretations are
not self-explanatory. The biologist's cheques are
backed by "Organism," "Protoplasm," "Hered-
ity," and so on, and no one can suppose that
these are self-explanatory terms. Some term of
this sort may be an absolutely necessary postu-
late in Biology, but it obviously means starting
with a great deal "given." And when we pass to
more exact sciences, and find the cheques backed
"Gravitation," "Chemical Affinity," and so on,
we must again recognize that a good deal is taken
as "given."

It may be said, however, that these terms of
description are continually undergoing a process

134 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

of simplification, and that is true. "Heat**
and "Light" have yielded to simplifying analysis;
perhaps "Chemical Affinity" is at present yield-
ing; perhaps the physicist may some day discover
the true inwardness of Gravitation, and be able
to tell us what really happens in the invisible
world when the apple falls in the orchard. It is
the aim of Science to reduce the number of abso-
lutely necessary concepts, but it does not in so
doing make those that remain any simpler.
"Matter" and "Energy" or other terms of the
same order of magnitude are always, as it were,
expanding as others are forced into them, and
remain as fundamental terms which are not self-
explanatory.

Taking "matter," for instance, which has
seemed to some the most trustworthy bedrock
on which to base their theoretical reconstruction
of the world, what a visionary thing it has become
in the hands of modern physics. The founders
©f the molecular theory laid down the idea that
each kind of matter has its characteristic kind of
particle; Dalton showed that we must think of
tiiese molecules as built up of atoms; modern
work is suggesting that there may be a common
basis for matter of all kinds, as if the different
kinds of atoms consisted of different numbers of
smaller corpuscles of the same kind. These are
tke negatively electrified particles — the corpuscles

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 13$

or electrons which all bodies give off under suit*
able treatment, such as raising to incandescence
or exposure to ultra-violet light. The atom is
now supposed to be built up of units of negative
electricity and of an equal number of units of
positive electricity, of very much greater mass,
the number of either kind being proportional to
the atomic weight; and the whole system is in a
state of equilibrium or of steady motion.

We must understand, however, that this elec-
trical theory of matter is far beyond verification,,
that it makes big assumptions, and that it leaves
many difficulties. Prof. Poynting writes in regard
to it: "The chief value of such a hypothesis lies,
not in its objective truth, but in its success in
accounting for, in co-ordinating, what we actually
observe, and in predicting results which are after-
wards verified. It is to be regarded as a 'working
model ' which gives the same results as the actual
atom, though, it may be, by quite different
machinery."

So that, after all, the theory of the electric atom
does not do more than represent the unknown,
reality in a faithfully symbolical matter. It is a
working thought-model. But how far we are get-
ting from the old "matter" of the naive material-
ists. And yet the difficulties have only begun*
for the matter of physical analysis is an abstrac-
tion, whereas the matter of our direct experience

136 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

is in certain conditions the physical basis of "life"
and the home of the "soul." And beyond this
there is the philosophical aspect of the problem
of matter.

As in its analytic so in its historical treatment
of things Science must confess its limitations. It
begins, not at the beginning — that is impossible,
but from something "given," which it does not
explain, which in the last resource it cannot explain.
From this something given — say primitive Amoe-
bae— much seems to have been evolved, and
Biology seeks to discover both the stages and
the operative factors in the evolution. But if
the primitive Amoebae gave rise "in the natural
course of events" to higher organisms, and these
to higher, until there emerged the supreme Mam-
mal, who by and by had a theory of it all, then
the primitive Amoebae which had in them the
promise and potency of all this were very wonder-
ful Amoebae indeed. There must have been more
in them than met the eye! We must stock them
with initiatives at least. We are taking a good
deal as "given."

Finally, it must be recognized that the terms of
scientific descriptions in their higher reaches are
"conceptual formulae." We speak glibly of
"Matter," "Energy," "Ether," "Atom," and so
on, but these are intellectual counters, rather
than the realities themselves. They are, so to

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 137

speak, counterfoils or symbols of reality. We may
well say of them what Hobbes said of words:
"They are wise men's counters, they do but
reckon by them, but they are the money of fools."

Yet we must not react too far from the realism
of old-fashioned Science! For while it is true
that Science only gets at fractions of reality, and
that it works with formulae and intellectual
counters, scientific conclusions are none the less
trustworthy indices of what does actually happen.
Otherwise we could not use them as a basis for
safe prophecy. No one knows what matter, gravi-
tation, inertia, and so on, really are; but the
established formulations which deal with them
have certainly a close correspondence with real-
ity. We need not do more than refer to the
familiar but astounding fact that, given three
good observations of a comet, and we can
prophesy with absolute certainty when it, barring
accidents, will return!

PROBLEMS BEFORE WHICH SCIENCE AND PHI-
LOSOPHY MEET. — The world is full of unsolved
problems — which give it part of its charm and
interest, and there is no prospect of the supply
running short. Some of these unsolved problems
are scientific, and he is rash indeed who will call
any of them insoluble. Many of the insoluble
problems of our forefathers have their solutions
stated in our text-books, and Science is still very

138 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

young. Moreover, some of the very difficult
unsolved problems are already being nibbled at
by scientific methods, which in itself is hopeful.

Every one must admit, however, that we are
confronted with a number of problems in regard
to which we find it difficult to think with clearness,
and in regard to which we seem to make little
progress. We refer to problems like that of the
origin of living organisms upon the earth, or that
of the living body as contrasted with an inanimate
system, or that of the relation of soul and body.
In reference to those and similar problems Science
has certain contributions to make, but these have
tended to increase rather than lessen the diffi-
culties of the situation. Thus it is much more
difficult for us to believe in spontaneous genera-
tion than it was for Harvey; it is much more
difficult for us to accept a mechanistic physiology
than it was for Descartes.

Now in regard to these very difficult problems
we should at least know where we stand, and the
scientific answer must be ' ' Ignoramus . " In regard
to a problem like the origin of life the only scien-
tific position at present is one of agnosticism. For
most minds, however, the consistently agnostic
position is difficult. As scientific inquirers we
piously adhere to it, but when we go out into the
street we speculate with the best of them. We
make hypotheses, the pros and cons of which

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 139

can be discussed, and we pass insidiously from
Science to Metaphysics. It is in the criticism of
these hypothetical constructions, which avowedly
go beyond verifiable science, that philosophical
criticism is of great value. Let us say a little, then,
in regard to two or three of the problems before
which Science and Philosophy meet.

ORIGIN OF LIVING CREATURES UPON THE
EARTH. — In the volume on EVOLUTION in this
Library, there is a brief discussion of this old-
standing problem, to the solution of which we
do not seem to be coming any nearer. We know
that the hot Earth must have been tenantless,
that until it cooled and consolidated it was quite
unfit to be a home of life. But we do not know
how living organisms began to be upon the earth.

Did germs of life come to our earth embosomed
in meteorites — from elsewhere, or had they their
cradle here — the offspring of inorganic evolution?
We do not know. May it have been, as Pfliiger
and Verworn have suggested, that the cyanogen
radical (CN) was the starting-point of the pro-
teid molecule which is an essential constituent of
the physical basis of life? We cannot discuss the
matter, but we must remember (1) that although
the synthetic chemist can do wonders in build-
ing up complex things from simple things he has
not yet come near the artificial synthesis of pro-
teids; (2) that we are at a loss to suggest what

140 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

in Nature's laboratory of chemical synthesis — a
somewhat hypothetical witch's cauldron — could
take the place of the directive chemist; and (3)
that there is a great gap between making organic
matter and making an organism.

The origin of organisms upon the earth remains
a riddle, and the most that we can say is, that the
hypothesis of the evolution of the living from the
not-living is in harmony with the general trend
of evolutionary theory. If it should become a
tenable theory, the dignity and value of living
creatures and of our own life would not be in any
way affected. On the contrary, if the dust of the
earth did naturally give rise to living creatures,
if they are in a real sense born of her and the
sunshine, then the whole world becomes more
continuous and vital, and all the inorganic groan-
ing and travailing becomes more intelligible.

We venture to quote in this connection a
passage from Prof. Lloyd Morgan's Interpretation
of Nature, which seems to us peculiarly useful in
a little book like this. "It is true, and should be
frankly admitted, that in the present state of
natural knowledge the antecedent conditions of
the genesis of protoplasm are unknown." . . .
But, "those who would single out from among
the multitudinous differentiations of an evolving
universe this alone for special interposition would
seem to do little honour to the Divinity they

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 141

profess to serve, Theodore Parker gave expres-
sion to a broader and more reverent theology
when he said: 'The universe, broad and deep and
high, is a handful of dust which God enchants.
He is the mysterious magic which possesses* —
not protoplasm merely, but— "the world'" (Lloyd
Morgan, 1905, p. 77).

How did living creatures begin to be upon the
earth? In point of Science, we do not know. We
cherish the hypothesis, however, that living crea-
tures evolved from not-living matter upon the
Earth. We do so mainly because we do not know
of any better hypothesis, and because it conforms
with our (metaphysical) ideal of continuity and
with the general idea of evolution. But we are
aware that the hypothesis is beset with very
serious scientific difficulties and with not less
serious philosophical difficulties.

Consider, for a moment, a famous passage
from Huxley: "If the fundamental proposition
of evolution is true, namely, that the entire world,
animate and inanimate, is the result of the mutual
interaction, according to definite laws, of forces
possessed by the molecules which made up the
primitive nebulosity of the universe; then it is
no less certain that the present actual world
reposed potentially in the cosmic vapour, and
that an intelligence, if great enough, could from
his knowledge of the properties of the molecules

142 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

of that vapour have predicted the state of the
fauna in Great Britain in 1888 with as much
certitude as we say what will happen to the vapour
of our breath on a cold day in winter."

This very strong and confident statement
appears to us to illustrate the need for philo-
sophical criticism. As Bergson points out, it
denies that time really counts; it also denies
that organisms are more than mechanisms. It
denies the creative individuality of the organism,
which trades with time in an unpredictable
way all its own. It may be right in these denials,
but the points are arguable. Moreover, the gen-
eral idea of evolution does not warrant us in sup-
posing that intelligent behaviour, for instance,
"reposed potentially in the cosmic vapour" and
could be predicted from a "knowledge of the
properties of the molecules of that vapour"; for
molecules and the like are abstractions of physical
science which, for the purposes of that science,
may be treated as if they represented the whole of
the reality. The "primitive nebulosity of the
universe" was a reality which, for the purposes
of physical science, would be analysable into a
whirling sea of molecules, but that certainly can-
not have been the whole truth about it if in it
there reposed potentially the present actual world.
To take an analogy from development, there is no
reason to believe that we should have exhausted

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 143

the reality of a human ovum if we knew all about
the properties of its proteid molecules, nor that
we could predict from that knowledge whether
the ovum would develop into a genius or a fool.

THE SECRET OF THE ORGANISM. — One of the
boundary-lines which is prominent in modern eyes
is that between the inanimate and the animate,
the not-living and the living. We call the bulk
of things we see "purely physical"; we call a
minority "physical and vital." We speak of this
distinction as if it were self-evident, but we must
not forget the panzoism of the savage and the
child, the poet and the philosopher. To the
former the distinction is unknown; by the latter
it has been transcended. To simple people and
to children, not-living bodies are often as alive
as birds, and even the matter-of-fact man forgets
his conventional philosophy on the golf-course
and the curling-pond, commanding and upbraid-
ing, encouraging and condemning, his ball or stone
as if it were indeed a living creature. In spite of
many resolute efforts on the part of philosophers
and scientists alike — the boundary-line between
the living and the not-living remains, and seems
likely to remain for long. As it is of some impor-
tance in our outlook, let us consider this distinction
between plants, animals and persons on the one
hand and "mere things" on the other.

In the first place in regard to the inanimate,

144 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the purely physical order: we almost always
know what to expect from a stone; it is among
the living that the unexpected happens. There
is absolute uniformity of response in the physical
order; there is caprice and humour in the ani-
mate order. We cannot recognize either individ-
uality or purposiveness in inanimate systems.
It is true that there is a great deal of effective
work done in the purely physical order. The sea
sculptures the shore, the river cuts a deep channel
in the rock, the glacier wears the mountains
smooth — but what is done is mechanically deter-
mined by the external conditions, not by any
freely moving, purposive individuality. And
while inanimate objects have a certain power of
response to external stimuli, as the gunpowder
shows when a lighted match is applied to it, the
responses of a living creature in normal surround-
ings are of a higher order of efficiency, they make
for self -preservation and betterment.

In discussing the characteristic features of living
creatures in the volume on EVOLUTION, we have
admitted that it is profitable to compare a living
creature to a machine and a fertile method of
discovery to press this comparison to its farthest.
"Yet the living organism differs from any machine
in its greater efficiency, and ... in being a self-
stoking, self-repairing, self-preservative, self-ad-
justing, self -increasing, self -reproducing engine!

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 145

And this also must be remembered in comparing
a living creature with a machine, that the latter
is no ordinary sample of the inorganic world. It
is an elaborated tool, an extended hand, and has
inside of it a human thought. It is because of
these qualities that highly complex machines come
to be so like organisms. But no machine profits
by experience, nor trades with time as organisms
do." Only living creatures have a persistent
unified behaviour, a power of profiting by experi-
ence, and a creative capacity as genuine agents.
Here, then, we have one of the great contrasts
in Nature, between the purely physical order and
the world of organisms. The scientific question
is whether the concepts and formulae that suffice
for the description of the inorganic world are also
sufficient for the description of vital functions
and animate behaviour. The answer of the
mechanistic school is "Yes"; all others say
"No," but not always for the same reasons.
We say "No" for the following reasons: —
(1) There are many chemical and physical
operations in a living body, but as a matter of
fact no complete physico-chemical description
has yet been given of any distinctively vital
activity. It has to be remembered that the most
salient fact is the correlation and control of all
the manifold chemical and physical processes so
that a unified behaviour results.

146 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

(2) It is not a conclusive argument, perhaps,
but one of some weight, that if we have not yet
succeeded in giving a physico-chemical descrip-
tion of a simple vital process, such as the passage
of digested food from the alimentary canal into the
blood, or the filtering of the blood by the kidney,
we need not at present seriously concern ourselves
in regard to the possibility of giving a physico-
chemical description of growth, cyclical develop-
ment, or every-day behaviour. If we think of
development for a moment, we cannot but feel
that the questions which the facts raise seem
very unlikely to receive an answer in terms of
mechanism. How are the heritable characters
of the race summed up potentially within the
minute germ cells? How do they gradually find
expression in the individual development, so that
ivhat we call differentiation results? What is the
nature of the compelling necessity that mints and
coins the chick out of a drop of living matter?
What is it that regulates the ordered progress
which, by intricate and often strangely circuitous
paths, leads to the fully-formed organism? It is
certainly wonderful the individual unpacking of
the racial treasure-box!

(3) But the most satisfactory reason, perhaps,
is the one referred to in the chapter on Scientific
Method, that the results of applying physico-
chemical analysis to the activities of living crea-

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 147

tures do not make these much more intelligible.
They do not give us the kind of answer that we
want in our endeavour to understand these
creatures better. Their development, their be-
haviour, and the correlation of their internal
activities, cannot be understood except on the
assumption that they are historical beings — as
Bergson has so well insisted.

Here the scientific position, all too briefly in-
dicated, ends; but it is open to the philosopher to
go farther. All that we have said is that the
mechanistic formulation of living creatures does
not answer the distinctively biological questions,
but for some minds it is imperative to go farther.
Where Science ends Philosophy begins; and in
Dr. Hans Driesch's Science and Philosophy of the
Organism we have one of the finest recent illus-
trations of a welcome partnership of the two
disciplines. We need not attempt to discuss his
strenuously thought-out theory of Vitalism, the
point for us here is simply that after giving three
scientific proofs that the mechanistic theory will
not work, he goes on to a philosophical construc-
tion— the conception of the "Entelechy " — an im-
material autonomous factor which punctuates the
transformations of energy that go on within the
body. The "Entelechy" is the living creature's
innermost secret, its directive soul, and whether
Dr. Driesch has been successful or not, he has

148 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

certainly been extraordinarily ingenious in evad-
ing the old criticism of crude views that the in-
>nuated immaterial factor, if it is to be effective,
must invalidate physico-chemical laws.

As an appendix to this brief discussion, we
wish to refer to the very strongly expressed con-
clusions of the most distinguished physicist of the
age — Lord Kelvin. He was, indeed, no biologist,
but the opinions held by one of his intellectual
eminence claim our attention. He knew how far
his Physics could go.

"The only contribution of dynamics to theo-
retical biology is absolute negation of automatic
commencement or automatic maintenance of life."

"The opening of a bud, the growth of a leaf,
the astonishing development of beauty in a flower,
involve physical operations which completed
chemical science would leave as far beyond our
comprehension as the differences between lead
and iron, between water and carbonic acid, be-
tween gravitation and magnetism, are at present.
A tree contains more mystery of creative power
than the sun, from which all its mechanical energy
is borrowed. An earth without life, a sun, and
countless stars, contain less wonder than that
grain of mignonette."

AN ILLUSTRATION. — Let us select some instance
of animal behaviour and look at it from the
mechanist and vitalist point of view. We take a

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 149

vivid one — the Migration of Eels, which has
been recently discussed in this connection by
Mr. E. S. Russell ("Vitalism," Rivista di Scienza,
April, 1911). It is a useful case, because the ani-
mal has a brain of a very low order, and we are
not warranted in using in regard to it the psycho-
logical terms which are indispensable in the case
of the more intelligent birds and mammals.

The eels of the whole of northern Europe prob-
ably begin their life below the 500-fathom line on
the verge of the Deep Sea away to the west of
Ireland and southward — on the verge of the dark,
cold, calm, silent, plantless world of the abysses.
The young eel develops and starts in life, and
feeds and grows far below the surface, but the
early chapters of the life-history are still quite
obscure, and do not at present concern us. It
rises to the upper sunlit waters as a transparent,
sideways flattened, knife-blade-like larva, about
three inches in length, writh no spot of colour
except in its eyes. It lives for many months in
this state — known as a Leptoccphalus — expending
energy in gentle swimming, but taking no food.
It subsists on itself, and becomes shorter and
lighter, and cylindrical instead of flat. It is
gradually transformed into a glass-eel, about two
and a half inches long, like a knitting-needle in
girth. It moves towards the shores. After about
a year it is one of a million elvers passing up one

150 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

of our rivers — in the wonderful eel-fare which
is one of the sights of Spring. If it is not fortunate,
it may take much more than a year to reach the
feeding-ground — those that ascend the rivers of
the eastern Baltic have journeyed over three
thousand miles. Eventually, however, a large
number do pass up the streams, and there is a
long period of feeding and growing in the slow-
flowing reaches and in fish-stocked ponds. There
is never any breeding in fresh water, but after
some years restlessness seizes the adults as it
seized the larvae — a restlessness due to a repro-
ductive, not a nutritive motive. There is an
excited return journey to the sea — and they don
wedding garments of silver as they go, and be-
come large of eye. They appear to migrate
hundreds of miles, often out into the Atlantic to
the verge of the Deep Sea, where, as far as we
know, the individual life ends in giving rise to
new lives. In no case is there any return.

We ask then what the Machine theory of Life
can make of a story like this, and it is only a type
of many. Let us keep to the second last chapter,
the migration to the spawning-grounds. Like
many other fishes, the eel requires specific condi-
tions of depth, salinity, and temperature. The
North Sea will not serve, for it is too shallow;
the Norwegian will not serve, for it is too cold.

What can the physiology that is only applied

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 151

physics and chemistry tell us? It can tell us how
the energy for the journey is obtained from
chemical explosions of reserve material in the
muscles of the eel's tail. It can tell us some of
the steps in the making of these reserve materials
out of the eel's food. It can tell us that the
muscles are kept rhythmically contracting by
nervous stimuli, and so on for a whole volume,
and yet it does not help us to understand the
migration to the spawning-grounds. To take
items in the process and reduce them (as far as
possible) to physical and chemical common denom-
inators, does not make any clearer the inter-con-
nection of all these items into the single act of
migration. Apply physico-chemical methods by
all means, the results are always of interest, but
the results are not useful in making the biological
fact of migration more intelligible.

Let us linger over the illustration, for it is
very instructive. As Russell says: "The migra-
tion is, so to speak, a fact of a higher order than
any physical or chemical fact, although it is made
up of an indefinitely large number of physical and
chemical facts. To explain the fact one must
accept it as a whole, not seek to conquer it by
dividing it, for if one analyses it into its com-
ponents one inevitably misses the bond of union.
... To decompose the act of migration into an
infinity of physico-chemical processes is to take

152 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

an infinity of little partial views of the act, but
what one needs for an explanation of the fact is
a comprehensive view which will unite all the
relevant features of it into one picture. To the
chemist confronted with this problem there is no
fact of migration at all, there is only an intricate
enravelment of chemical reaction; to the biolo-
gist the fact of migration to a particular region
for a particular purpose is cardinal, and the
chemical processes involved in the action are
negligible."

But if the mechanistic account of the eel's
migration fails, is the vitalistic one any better?
Let us think of this for a little. The aim of biol-
ogy is not to give ultimate explanations, but to
render biological phenomena intelligible; and
that means to obtain general conceptions as to
their nature. We explain a thing biologically
when we relate it to some general fact or formula
of living things.

Therefore if pressed to make the story of the
eel less of a curiosity, we should ask to be allowed
to start with the concept of an organism with
certain at present irreducible qualities — one of
the biggest of which is simply that it is an histori-
cal being. It is determined by the past— its own
past and the past of its race. Its inheritance is
a treasure-store of the ages. Non-living things
have no history in the biological sense. The

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 153

hand of the past has left its impress on them, but
the living hand of the past is on the organism
for ever. In the organism, as Bergson says, the
past is prolonged into the present. Thus we pass
on to a new level of explanation or interpretation
— which is historical.

And whenever we mention that the eel is one
of a deep-sea race which has adventurously
taken to colonizing the fresh waters — just as
the salmon is one of a freshwater race which has
taken to exploiting the sea, and notice further
that animals in general return to their birthplace
to breed — then at once a biological light begins
to be shed on the eel's strange story.

THE "SouL AND BODY" PROBLEM. — No one
understands how living creatures began to be
in pre-Cambrian ages in a lifeless world, and
no one understands the innermost secret of their
activity. Similarly at a higher level: No one
understands how thinking creatures began to
be, nor understands what the innermost secret
of thinking is. But just as the scientific inquirer
has a contribution to make to the discussion of
the origin of life and the autonomy of the organ-
ism, so he has something to say in regard to the
perennial question of the relation between body
and mind, a question which is, however, essentially
metaphysical.

The scientific contribution is threefold: —

154 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

(a) In the first place, while we do not know of
any transitions between the not-living and the
living, we have a long inclined plane or a long
series of steps connecting the very simple reactions
of unicellular creatures with the intelligent be-
haviour of dogs and horses, and even with the
rational conduct of man. This inclined plane
or this staircase is very impressive, and must
have a bearing on the general problem. There
is a fascination in what may be called the begin-
nings of behaviour, illustrated by some of the
Infusorians. Their daily life seems as if it could
be summed up in a sentence. They have only
one answer to every question. To all sorts of
stimuli they respond in the same way — by back-
ing off, turning slightly on one side, and then
going ahead again. They remind us of a steamer
in a river which knocks against a snag, reverses
engines, alters its direction a little, and then
steams ahead. This is surely the simplest kind
of behaviour, where there is only one reaction.

Slightly higher in the scale, but still very simple,
is the behaviour of some Protozoa which have a
number of reactions or responses to stimuli, and
seem to try one after the other until, it may be,
one succeeds. We do not know how much lies
concealed in that process of " seeming to try." We
know that it is different from the experimenting
of a scientist who tries various ways of solving

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 155

a problem; we know that it is different from the
experimenting of a burglar who tries which key
in a bunch will open a particular door; we know
that it is different from the experimenting of a
dog trying to take a stick with a hooked handle
through the close-set upright bars of a fence; we
know that it is different from the behaviour of
earthworms trying various ways of transporting
leaves to their burrows; but is it not the beginning
of the "trial by error" method, common to all
these instances?

(6) In the second place, the "genetic psycholo-
gist" has much to tell us of the individual develop-
ment of behaviour, of the gradual emergence of
capacities of action — whether instinctive (involv-
ing apparently no inference), intelligent (involv-
ing apparently perceptual inference), or rational
(involving conceptual inference). Comparative
child-study in the wide sense, zoological as well
as anthropological, has surely some bearing on
the general question.

(c) In the third place, Science has much to
say in regard to the actual correlation between
the static and the dynamic aspects, between
structure and function. Complexity of brain
structure is associated with very intelligent
behaviour; increase in the complexity of brain
structure from year to year in the individual is
associated with increased capacity of intelligent

156 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

behaviour; certain parts of the brain are corre-
lated with certain kinds of behaviour such as
speech; the health or the disease of the brain
is correlated withj the efficiency of behaviour.
There are numerous scientific data of this sort,
and they have nothing particular to do with
the metaphysical theory of "psycho-physical
parallelism."

The scientific inquirer tries to fight shy of
the metaphysical problem of the relation of
body and mind, but, of course, in vain. He
will hold to the unity of the organism (thus
making a metaphysical assumption), and it is
the behaviour of the creature that he will partic-
ularly study. He can watch the dog and de-
scribe its behaviour; he can make experiments
to test its alertness, its memory, its power of
inference, and so on. In the case of birds, whose
eggs can be hatched in the laboratory, he dis-
covers what capacities are inborn and what have
to be acquired by learning. He can do all this
without getting into difficulties over the relations
of the dog's body and the dog's mind. The biolo-
gist prefers to keep to the dog. In this practical
monism he is confirmed by the philosophers who
make it clear that "body" and "soul" are equally
abstractions. "The severance of the original
unity of experience into a physical and a psy-
chical aspect is entirely a product of our own

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 157

abstraction-making intellect. 'Body' and 'soul'
are not given actualities of experience, but arti-
ficial mental constructions of our own" (Taylor,
1903, p. 314). We are the realities, who pigeon-
hole for purposes of study our "mind" and our
"body."

The scientific inquirer may try to remain as
a student of "the original unity of his experience,"
agnostically confronting one of the great mysteries
of the world, but as a man he soon strains at his
self-made tether. And he is likely to be soon
back at the old questions: Which is primary —
the Brain or the Mind? Is the brain the instru-
ment or means, rather than the condition or
cause, of mental development? Do the bodily
changes form an unbroken causal series, some-
times associated with states of consciousness,
which are effects, but never causes? Or is there
a curious double series of cerebral events and
psychical events, running "parallel" (whatever
that may mean) but not causally connected? Or
are there two series of processes going on which
interact, causally influencing one another at
different points, sensation being a mental state
which has bodily processes (in the nervous stimu-
lation) among its immediate antecedents, and a
motor reaction similarly a bodily process with
mental antecedents (our will)? We need not go
farther: the scientific inquirer has landed in the

158 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

discussion of the metaphysical theories of "epi-
phenomenalism," " parallelism " and " interaction."
Apart from frankly metaphysical specula-
tion, the possibilities are (1) to remain content
with an agnostic position, or (2) to push on the
scientific study yet farther.

(1) We may illustrate the first possibility by
a quotation from Huxley (1863): "I must ad-
here to what seems to my mind a simpler form
of notation — i. e. to suppose that all phenomena
have the same substratum (if they have any),
and that soul and body, or mental and physical
phenomena, are merely diverse manifestations
of that hypothetical substratum. In this way, it
seems to me, I obey the rule which works so well
in practice, of always making the simplest possi-
ble suppositions." . . . "My fundamental axiom
of speculative philosophy is that materialism
and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same
absurdity — the absurdity of imagining that we
know anything about either spirit or matter"
(Huxley, 1863).

(2) We may illustrate the second possibility
by a quotation from Prof. W. MacDougall: "We
observe a constant concurrence or concomitance
of events of the two orders — the physical and the
psychical; and this constant concomitance leads
even the most unreflecting man to assume some
orderly relation between them. The fact of the

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 159

relation has therefore always been recognized
since men first began to reflect. But the nature
of this relation that so clearly obtains between the
physical and psychical worlds remained a sub-
ject of speculation only until long after the scien-
tific method has been applied with success to
each of these realms independently. In fact, it
was not until the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury that the scientific method was brought to
bear upon the problem of the nature of this
relation; and it was this, the application of the
scientific method to this problem, that led to
the development of that youngest branch of
science known as psycho-physics.

"For psycho-physics may be broadly defined
as the application of the scientific method to the
investigation of the relation between the psy-
chical and the physical. This step was taken, and
this new branch of Science was founded, by
Gustav Theodor Fechner, Professor of Physics
at Leipzig, with full consciousness of the nature
and importance of the step. In his celebrated
work, Elemente der Psycho-physik, published in
1860, Fechner says: 'By psycho-physics is to be
understood an exact study of the functional
relations, or relations of dependence, between
body and soul, or, in more general terms, between
the bodily and the mental, the physical and the
psychical worlds." (See MacDougall: "Psycho-

160 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

physical Method," in Lectures on the Method of
Science, Oxford, 1906, p. 114.)

A QUESTION. — In regard to "the soul and
body problem" and also in regard to "the secret
of the organism," some reader may be inclined
to press the following question: This discussion
of "the unity of the organism " and " the autonomy
of the organism " is all very well, but do you mean
that there is in the living creature more than
matter and energy, or not? To this and similar
questions the scientific answer must be that the
question is not rightly put. We do not know
what matter really is, nor what all the energies
of matter may be. What we do know is, that
physico-chemical formulae do not make the
living creature intelligible, and that we have
no warrant for asserting that the physical con-
cepts of "matter" and "energy," abstracted off
for special scientific purposes, exhaust the reality
of Nature.

We have known of a school where the distinc-
tive feature was solidarity, loyalty, and esprit
de corps. No one ever saw this esprit de corps,
but it was, in a way, the most real thing about
the school. So, though we may not be able to
understand it, the hierarchy of Nature is full of
illustrations, on an ever grander scale as we
ascend the series, of the fact that the whole may
be greater than the sum of its parts. Thus we

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 161

feel sure that organisms reveal a deeper aspect
of reality than crystals do, and that in this sense
there is more in the plant than in the crystal,
more in the animal than in the plant, more in
the bird than in the worm, more in man than in
them all.

Let us try to state our personal position in a
few words. With our biological prepossessions
it seems clear to us that students of science would
breathe more freely if they could rid themselves
of the influence of the hypothesis, so character-
istic of Kant, that there is but one science of
Nature and that the category of mechanism is
the only one we need. It seems to us that there
are several sciences of Nature, and that other
than mechanical categories are required in two
of these.

(1) There is the physical order of Nature —
the inorganic world — where mechanism reigns
supreme. (2) There is the vital order of Nature —
the world of organisms — where mechanism proves
insufficient. (3) There is the psychical order of
Nature — the world of mind — where mechanism
is irrelevant. Thus there are three fundamen-
tal sciences — Physics, Biology, and Psychology —
each with characteristic questions, categories and
formulae.

It is evident, indeed, that the physical order
overlaps the vital, for the life of the organism

162 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

implies a succession of chemical and physical
processes. But, as we have seen, the life of the
organism also implies a co-ordination, a purposive-
ness, an individuality, a creative agency, a power
of trading with time, a history — in all of which
it transcends mechanism. Similarly, both the
vital and the physical overlap the psychical with-
out, as we understand it, affecting the autonomy
of psychology.

Looking at the question historically, we recog-
nize that there was for millions of years, in the
development of the earth, only a physical order
as far as met the eye. That is to say, everything
(short of the origin of life) that happened during
these millions of years was capable of descrip-
tion in physico-chemical terms. These are so
" true to Nature" that just as we can predict the
return of a comet, so in many cases we can safely
speak of great events that occurred before there
was any life whatever upon the earth. It is quite
another matter, however, to say that physico-
chemical categories exhausted the reality of Nature
in these pre-organic days. Indeed, if life and
mind and man have evolved from the reality
which was physically describable as a nebula, we
may safely say that the physical description is
certainly not exhaustive.

In the same way, there were long ages, in the
evolution of organisms, during which (in addi-

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 163

tion to the physical) there was only a vital order.
No brains worthy of the name had yet been
differentiated, and everything might have been
described in biological terms, just as we may de-
scribe the ongoings of an amoeba or of a fresh-
water hydra. It is quite another matter, however,
to say that biological categories exhausted the
reality of animate Nature in these pre-mental
days. Indeed, if intelligent behaviour and hu-
man reason evolved from the reality which was
biologically describable as a number of simple
organisms, we may safely say that the biological
description is certainly not exhaustive. The
same holds good in regard to the development of
the individual human being.

In questions like this, which are perhaps be-
yond the limits of human intelligence, diagrams
and metaphors are apt to do more harm than
good, but we might compare the order of Nature
which we study to a great fabric passing from the
loom of time with a pattern slowly changing as
the ages pass. It is woven of threads of different
colours which it is the business of the several
sciences to follow, unravelling the web. We
can well imagine that there are areas of fabric
in which certain threads seem to be absent, where,
indeed, their hidden presence may be ignored,
except in reference to further stretches of the web.
In the area that we call the physical order we

164 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

can afford to act as if the only threads were
mechanical, but in truth it may be otherwise.
In the area which we call the biological order
the mechanical threads are continued, but they
are no longer dominant. In the area which we
call psychical the organic threads are continued,
but others form the pattern. As we pass from
inorganic to organic, from organic to psychical,
the mechanical warp becomes as it were less
important, and new aspects of Reality find freer
expression. But the metaphor is hopeless in its
suggestion of threads that are passively twisted
and interlaced. We have to think of living
threads, like those of some of the simplest
Protists which spin a changeful web. We have
to think of living threads that share in working
out the pattern of the web.

SUMMARY. — The aim of Science is the descrip-
tion of facts, the aim of Philosophy their interpre-
tation. There is much need for critical Metaphysics
to function as a sublime Logic, testing the complete-
ness and consistency of scientific descriptions,
whether of things as they are or of the way in which
they have come to be. On the other hand, meta-
physics should not reach forward to its constructive
system without taking account of the raw material
which the sciences furnish. The scientific account
of things is self-limited by the nature of its descrip-
tions: Only in mechanics can we say " The Cause

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 165

is equal to the Effect" the terms of scientific de-
scription require themselves to be explained; the
beginnings from which Science starts contain much
that is "given" or taken for granted; the terms of
scientific descriptions are "conceptual formulae."
Before problems such as the origin of living creatures
upon the earth, the secret of the organism, the rela-
tion of soul and body, Science and Philosophy
must meet. Science offers certain contributions to
the discussion and must then remain qua Science
agnostic. To most minds it seems imperative to
go on to metaphysical theory, and it is better to do
this frankly and deliberately than unconsciously
or at random.

CHAPTER VI

SCIENCE AND ART

"For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me:
With my inward eye 'tis an old man grey,
With my outward a thistle across my way."

— BLAKE.

Inter-relations of Science and Art — ^Esthetics — Man's Emo-
tional Relation to Nature — Fundamental Impressions of
Nature — Nature more than a Mirror — Raw Materials
of Poetry — Opposition between Science and Feeling —
Summary.

INTER-RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND ART. —
The connection of the Sciences with the arts and
crafts is well known, but it is generally supposed
that Science and Art (both with very large capi-
tals) are as the poles asunder. And this in spite
of the "Science and Art" Department and its
examinations, so familiar thirty years ago!

Of a truth, however, the ideal which these

expressed, perhaps not always wisely or well,

was a sound one, for Science and Art have close

relations. In the first place, there is a scientific

166

SCIENCE AND ART 167

study of aesthetics, a psychology of Art — a sub-
ject so difficult that we cannot do more than refer
to it here. In the second place, it is certain, though
rarely realized, that Science has precious gifts
to place in the hands of Art that she may fashion
them magically into beauty. Science has enor-
mous treasure-caves full of what we cannot but
describe as the raw materials of poetry. And just
as the famous painter told his questioner that he
mixed his colours "with brains," so it is beyond
doubt that Science, with its subtle revelations
of the order of Nature, may enhance even the
artist's visions. In the third place, in spite of
what we have just said, there is a very interesting
opposition between the two moods. They may
help one another, but when one is in the saddle
it must keep the other at a spear's length.

There is another possible relation between
Science and Art which well deserves to be thought
over. Is it not the case that in its higher reaches
Science often becomes artistic? Thus Mr. Bran-
ford writes —

"Routine-skill, scientific skill, and artistic
skill form an ascending series of human power
and activity. For true art, in whatever occupa-
tion it may be developed, is the final and highest
expression of our whole character, powers, and
personality — whether the artist be a handicrafts-
man or a headcraftsman, or both. Above and

168 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

beyond their scientific skill, all great scientists
possess much of this artistic skill, the very por-
tion, indeed, of their experience and experimenting
which they themselves never fully understand,
though the source of then* greatest discoveries,
and which, essentially incommunicable, necessarily
dies with the possessor" (Branford, 1904, p. 12).
^ESTHETICS. — As we have indicated, it is be-
yond our power in this short Introduction to do
more than refer to the interesting study called
aesthetics. It inquires into the characteristics
of that familiar experience which we call enjoy-
ing Nature or Art, and of the rarer experience of
productive artists. It asks such questions as
the following: How does the sense of beauty
differ from other states? The pleasure that we
get from music or from the silence that is in the
starry sky, from the restless sea eternally new or
from the sleep that is among the lonely hills;
how does it differ from other pleasures? What
is the meaning of those sensations that follow
changes in breathing, circulation, and the like,
when we enjoy beautiful scenery and music?
What gives aesthetic pleasure its peculiar quality
of "relative permanency," a thing of beauty
being "a joy for ever" though we never see it
again? What can be known of the "artistic
instinct" or of the artist's creativeness? How
is the art-instinct linked to the play-instinct?

SCIENCE AND ART 169

What have been the factors in the evolution of
Art?

It goes without saying that aesthetics has its
philosophical as well as its scientific side, and we
may perhaps best illustrate the former in a brief
space by quoting the views of a leading sesthe-
tician on the relations of the True and the Good
and the Beautiful. Dr. Henry Rutgers Marshall
suggests that "the Beautiful is the Real as dis-
covered in the world of impression; the relatively
permanent pleasure which gives us the sense of
beauty being the most stable characteristic of
those parts of the field of impression which inter-
est us." He proposes the following scheme —

THE REAL

or

THE TRUE

(hi the broad

sense of the

term).

The Real of Impression —
The Beautiful.

The Real of Expression —
The Good

The Real in Realms exclu-
sive of a and ft — The True
(in the narrower sense of
the term).

MAN'S EMOTIONAL RELATION TO NATUBE. —
It is part of "man's chief end" not only to know
Nature — which is Science, but to enjoy her for
ever. We are men of feeling, and Nature speaks
to our heart, though we are not fond, unless we

170 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

are poets, of saying much about it. But we listen
with gladness, with awe, sometimes, perhaps,
with fear, surely always with wonder. The
grandeur of the star-strewn sky, the mystery of
the mountains, the sea eternally new, the way of
the eagle in the air, the meanest flower that blows
— somewhere, sometime, somehow, every one con-
fesses with emotion, "This is too wonderful for
me." When we consider the abundance of
power in the world, the immensities, the intri-
cacy and vitality of everything, the wealth of
sentient life, the order that persists amid inces-
sant change, the vibrating web of inter-relations,
the thousand and one fitnesses, the evolutionary
progress that is like "the unity of an onward
advancing melody," and the beauty that is
through and through, we are convinced that
our wonder is reasonable.

As we come to know Nature better, we find
that everything is equally wonderful if we know
enough about it, for, as Meredith says, with his
wonted insight: "You of any well that springs,
may unfold the heaven of things." As Whitman
says —

"A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-
work of the stars,

And the ant is equally perfect, and the grain
of sand, and the egg of the wren,

SCIENCE AND ART 171

And the tree-toad is a masterpiece for the

highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the

parlours of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge on my hand puts to

scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depressed head

surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger

sextillions of infidels."

As we begin to feel at home in Nature, our
wonder grows into delight and what may almost
be called affection. This is true of those who
have what Meredith called "love exceeding a
simple love of the things that glide in grasses and
rubble of woody wreck." In many ways we are
drawn close to Nature by emotional cords which
we sever at our peril.

Historical inquiry shows that in the culture of
the mood which dominates the man of feeling
there have been two great schools — human life
itself and Nature. It is evident that without
schooling in the human drama, with its joys and
sorrows, achievements and failures, Man would
have made much less of Nature emotionally.
One may go farther and say that without age-
long schooling in the Humanities, Man would
tave made much less of Nature. On the other

172 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

hand, from the first till to-day schooling in Nature
has deepened humane feeling, as many of the
poets have confessed; and our position is that
schooling in Nature has been and remains an
essential part of the discipline of the developing
human spirit. Think of the past for a moment.

Man was cradled in Nature and brought up
in close contact with Nature, and the influences
of Nature have supplied the raw materials of,
perhaps, half the poetry and art in the world.
From language and literature, from religion and
rites, and from what may be seen still among
simple peoples, it seems certain that the influences
of Nature took a very firm grip of Man in the
making. Very largely, perhaps, in a half-con-
scious way, just as in our own childhood, but
none the less firmly. The poet tells us of the
child who went forth every day, and what the
child saw became part of him for a day, or for
years, or for stretching cycles of years; and what
is true of the individual has been equally true of
the race.

FUNDAMENTAL IMPRESSIONS OF NATURE. — It
is unlikely that the impressions borne in on
our early ancestors were essentially different
from those that come to us, though the particular
form and colour of the impression must vary
from age to age. What, then, are the essential
impressions? When we reflect on this in the

SCIENCE AND ART 173

silence of a starry night, or in the bewilderment
of a storm, or in the detachment of mid-ocean,
or with the exalted feeling that rewards a long
climb, we recognize various elements which com-
bine in the complex feeling of Wonder.

First, there comes to us a sense of the world-
power, its dynamic — a sense of the powers that
make our whole solar system travel in space
toward an unknown goal, that keep our earth
together and whirling round the sun, that sway
the tides and rule the winds, that mould the dew-
drop and build the crystal, that clothe the lily
and give us energy for every movement and
every thought — in short, that keep the whole
system of things agoing. Looking at radium-
containing rock and the like with modern spec-
tacles, we get a glimpse of the powers — like
charmed genii — that may be imprisoned in the
apparently inert dust. Even more vividly to
some of us there comes a sense of the power
of life — so abundant, so insurgent, so creative.
"The narrowest hinge on my hand puts to scorn
all machinery"; a fire-fly is a much more eco-
nomical light-producer than an arc-lamp; a fish
is a far more efficient engine than those which
move a steamship; and an invisible pinch of
microbes could kill all of us in a few hours.

Secondly, there comes to us a feeling of the
immensities. It was a red-letter day in our child-

174 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

hood when we first climbed to the summit and
saw over the hills and far away — strath beyond
strath, and then the sea; and the simple, open
mind has always been impressed with the "big-
ness" of Nature, with the apparently boundless
and unfathomable sea, by the apparently un-
ending plains, by the mountains whose tops are
lost in the clouds, by the expanse of the heavens.
And even when we take the sternest modern
science for our pilot — precise and cautious to a
degree — we find that we are sailing in a practi-
cally infinite ocean. For leagues and leagues
beyond there is always more sea.

Thirdly, there comes a sense of pervading order.
Probably this began at the very dawn of human
reason — when man first discovered the year with
its magnificent object-lesson of regularly recur-
rent sequences, and it has been growing ever since.
Doubtless the early forms that this perception
of order took referred to somewhat obvious uni-
formities; but is there any essential difference
between realizing the orderliness of moons and
tides, of seasons and migrations, and discovering
Bode's law of the relations of the planets, or Men-
deleeff's "Periodic Law" of the relations of the
atomic weights of the chemical elements?

Fourthly, there comes to us a feeling of the
universal flux, in spite of which order persists.
As Heraclitus said, irdvTa pet, all things are in

SCIENCE AND ART 175

flux. "The rain falls; the springs are fed; the
streams are filled and flow to the sea; the mist
rises from the deep and the clouds are formed,
which break again on the mountain side. The
plant captures air, water, and salts, and, with
the sun's aid, builds them up by vital alchemy
into the bread of life, incorporating this into
itself. The animal eats the plant; and a new in-
carnation begins. All flesh is grass. The animal
becomes part of another animal, and the reincar-
nation continues." Finally, if we can use such
a word, the silver cord of the bundle of life is
loosed, and earth returns to earth. The microbes
of decay break down the dead, and there is a
return to air and water and salts. All things
flow. It may be that the old naturalists had not
such a vivid conception of the circulation of mat-
ter as we *have to-day, but the essential idea is
certainly ancient.

Perhaps we have said enough to illustrate this
part of our simple, argument (which we have
developed further in The Bible of Nature, 1908)
that there are certain inevitable and fundamental
impressions borne in on man by Nature which
have meant much to man throughout the ages,
which are strengthened, not weakened, by modern
science. They have not changed in their essen-
tial character since ancient days, but they have
become deeper and more subtle — the impressions

176 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

of power, of immensity, of order, and of flux.
These are probably the most widespread and
fundamental impressions, but every open-eyed
observer to-day has doubtless others that have
meant much to him in the way both of stimulus
and of mental furniture.

There is the impression of wealth, exuberance,
and manifoldness. Star differs from star in glory
and their numbers are beyond reckoning; every
mountain, every stream, has its individuality;
there are over eighty different kinds of chemical
elements; the number of minerals is legion; there
are four hundred and forty-two species of birds
in the list for the small islands of Great Britain
and Ireland; and there is many a class of animals
that has far more different species than we see of
stars on a clear night.

An allied impression is that of intricacy. As
President Jordan says, "The simplest organism
we know is far more complex than the consti-
tution of the United States." The body of an
ant is many times more intricate — visibly intri-
cate— than a steam-engine; its brain, as Darwin
said, is perhaps the most marvellous speck of
matter in the universe. The physicists tell us
that the behaviour of hydrogen gas makes it
necessary to suppose that an atom of it must
have a constitution as complex as a constellation,
with about eight hundred separate corpuscles.

SCIENCE AND ART 177

Another impression of a basal sort is that the
world is a network of inter-relations. Nature
is a vast system of linkages. There is a corre-
lation of organisms in Nature comparable to the
correlation of organs in our body. There is a
web of life. Cats are connected with the clover
crop, rats with plague, earthworms with our food-
supply, the spring sunshine with mackerel. The
face of Nature is like the surface of a gently
flowing stream, where hundreds of dimpling
circles touch and influence one another in an
intricate complexity of action and reaction beyond
the ken of the wisest.

These impressions of manifoldness, of intri-
cacy, of inter-relatedness are relatively modern,
as is also a sense of the crowning wonder of the
world, that the succession of events has been in
the main progressive. What we more or less
dimly discern in the long past is not like the
succession of patterns in a kaleidoscope; it is
rather like the sequence of stages in the individual
development of a plant or an animal — stages
whose import is disclosed more and more fully
as the development goes on. It is not a phan-
tasmagoric procession that the history of animate
Nature revels: it is a drama. As Lotze said,
there is "the unity of an onward-advancing
melody."

NATURE MORE THAN A MIRROR.— We are

178 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

seeking to suggest that there are a number of
strong impressions borne in on man by Nature
which have formed and should continue to form
the raw materials of poetry and the impulses of
other forms of art. But before continuing this
simple argument, we must pause for a moment
to protest against the not uncommon heresy that
Nature is man's creation! We are told that
Nature has no suggestions of her own, that what
we see in Nature depends on the arts that have
already influenced us, that Wordsworth found
in stones the sermons which he had himself hidden
there.

But this seems to us an extreme subjectivism.
It is indeed the function of Art to read into
Nature, but the impressions which we have been
discussing have scientific validity. And if it be
urged that it is difficult to free even science from
anthropomorphism, as has been illustrated in the
volume on EVOLUTION in this Library, we should
answer that this applies rather to theoretical
interpretations than to the great data of expe-
rience. When a scientific impression is really
sound, it is not something that may be accepted
or rejected as one will, it does not depend on
individual outlook, it stands the test of veri-
fiability by all normal intelligences.

RAW MATERIALS OF POETRY. — Our argument,
then, is this, that the fundamental impressions

SCIENCE AND ART 179

of Nature, some of which we have indicated,
have scientific validity. They are borne in on
man and not artistically projected from him.
They are cumulative syntheses of facts of expe-
rience, and some of:them, though varying in form
and colour from age to age, are very ancient.
They have never ceased to supply the raw mate-
rials of poetry. Demonstrably, indeed, a large
part of the world's poetry from Homer to Tenny-
son, from the Nature-Psalms to Meredith, has
been saturated with their influence.

In ancient days there were those who knew
Nature well and loved her well, who felt that
while they could discover certain secrets that
cleared their outlook and made for practical
advantage, yet there remained much that was
elusive and mysterious. So they did what Man
has always done, they used art to express their
feeling of Nature's powers and immensities, of
the pervading order amid a restless flux. For
instance, they fashioned what we sometimes
call Fairy Tales, many of which are artistic
expressions of very sound science. Many of them,
for instance, reveal a very penetrating insight
into the gist of natural phenomena, especially
of the march of the seasons. Let us take one
instance.

"There was Dornroschen, the Sleeping Beauty
— (our fair Earth), wounded by a spindle (the

180 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

frost of winter), who slumbered, as the seeds do,
but did not die. One after another strove, so
the story runs, to win a way through the barriers
which encircled the place of her sleeping, but at
length the Prince and Master came, to whom all
was easy — the Sunshine of the first spring day;
and as he kissed the Sleeping Beauty, all the
buglers blew, both high and low, the cawing rooks
on the trees, and the croaking frogs by the pond,
each according to his strength and skill. All
through the palace there was reawakening: of
the men-at-arms, whether bears or hedgehogs;
of the night watchmen, known to us as bats; even
of the carpet sweepers, like dormice and hamsters
— all were reawakened. The messengers went
forth with the news, the dragon-flies like living
flashes of light, the bustling humble-bees refresh-
ing themselves at the willow catkins by the way,
the moths flying softly by night."

If these are not good interpretations, there are
other exegeses to choose from. (See Frazer's
Golden Bough and our Biology of the Seasons,
1911.)

Fine as are the old Nature myths and fairy
tales, it seems obvious that each age should make
its^own, if it can. And the possibility depends on
two things. First, on keeping close to the funda-
mentals, sojourning with Nature, for it is touching
and handling that counts; listening to sounds,

SCIENCE AND ART 181

not to echoes of sounds; experiencing day and
night, summer and winter, cold and heat, not
simply reading about them. "Nur was dufuhlst,
das ist dein Eigenthum." "Only what you feel
is your very own." And second, on enriching
the mind with the results of science, with its
fresh facts, its new outlooks, its revised laws.
Only thus may there arise a new Nature-poesy —
a new heaven and a new earth such as each gener-
ation has a right to make for itself.

What an emotional asset, for instance, in the
facts regarding the Earth's relation to the Sun
which is its "mother-country"! "All energy is
a transformation of the sun, the logs which feed
our hearths are warehoused from the sun, the
locomotive moves by an effect due to that power
of the sun which has been lying dormant for ages
in the subterreanean beds of coal, the horse draws
its strength from crops which are also produced
by the sun," and so the familiar story runs to
water-mills and windmills and how much more —
all owing their power to the sun.

The emotional assets furnished by astronomy
are well known. They are so great that we can
well understand the poet's conviction that "the
undevout astronomer is mad." We have referred
to the immensities of Nature, but better than big
words is the picture in the volume on ASTRONOMY
in this Library. "Imagine a model in which the

182 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

sun is represented by a grain of sand one-hun-
dredth of an inch in diameter, and the earth
by a quite invisible speck one inch away. Upon
this scale the nearest star will be another grain
of sand some four miles away." . . . The sun
would take at his present speed in space some
seventy thousand years to reach his nearest
neighbour. . . . "Despite the richness of the
sky, the emptiness of space is its most striking
characteristic."

The great concepts of physics — such as the
law of gravitation, the luminiferous ether, and
the conservation of energy — are assets in the life
of feeling. "In accordance with the conception
of the conservation of energy there is no real
cessation of energy motion, there is only an
alteration in its mode; thus the sum total remains
for ever the same, one mode changing to another
without any energy ceasing or being lost in the
transformation." And speaking of this, Prof.
Gotch continues: "Such an imaginative flight
is far beyond all sense experience. To the thought
of a scientific man the universe, with all its suns
and worlds, is throughout one seething welter of
modes of motion, playing in space, playing in the
ether, playing in all existing matter, playing in
all living things, playing, therefore, in ourselves.
Now locked together in more intimate embrace,
potential energy, now unlocked and streaming as

SCIENCE AND ART 183

kinetic energy through space, continually alter-
nating between these two settings, this eternal
motion never ceases, is never dissipated, and is
never recreated; it simply exists. The concep-
tion thrills the imagination like a poem" (Gotch,
1906, p. 55).

One of the great changes in modern intellectual
development has been the transition from a
static to a dynamic way of looking at things.
What began in astronomy spread to geology and
thence to biology, and now every science owns to
the change. The subject-matter is considered
in its becoming, in its present activity, and as in
process of evolution. Everything is seen "in the
light of evolution." And this familiar intellec-
tual transition has given a thrill to art.

Again, it is well known that modern progress
in chemistry and physics has given us a much
more vital conception of what has been labelled
or libelled as "dead matter." To speak of inert
matter, at any rate, is an anachronism. We
believe that every one who feels something of the
witchery and mystery of precious stones will
admit that his vision is illumined and intensified
by what modern science has to tell of the internal
activity or "life" of jewels.

And, again, it is characteristic of at least a
large school of modern biologists that they assert
the autonomy of their science and the transcen-

184 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

dence of life over mechanism. We cannot give a
mechanical interpretation of an animate system
that in some mysterious way is more than the
sum of its parts, that has unified effective be-
haviour from the start, that has experience and
profits by it, that has a history behind it and
never ceases itself to trade with time. Thus the
Neo-Vitalists have made a home for the Dryad,
which some of them think they have even demon-
strated. With a suitable constituency of serious
students, the severer the biological discipline is
the more vital do things become. The old wood-
man who planted and tended his tree often had
an almost personal or parental interest in his
charge; the modern forester may lose this with
the change in the world's pace, but there comes
to him instead, in proportion as he knows his
business, a vision of the tree translucent, with its
intricate architecture and its intense life. "The
Dryad, living and breathing, moving and sensi-
tive, is again within the tree."

Let us collect a few Natural History illustra-
tions. Many voyagers across the Atlantic have
watched the sun set in the water, lingering for a
minute or two like a ball of fire balanced on the
tight string of the horizon, and have waited after-
wards till it was quite dark except for the stars
and the "phosphoresence" — a multitude of glow-
ing suns above and a greater multitude of gleam-

SCIENCE AND ART 185

ing animalcules below! There is a cascade of
sparks at the prow, a stream of sparks all along
the water level, a welter of sparks in the wake, and
even where the waves break there is fire. So it
goes on for miles and hours — the luminescence
of the rapid burning away of pinhead-like crea-
tures, so numerous that a tubful contains more
of them than there are people in London and New
York together. This is just one of a thousand
ways of feeling the abundance of life.

Many have enjoyed one of the great pleasures
in life, that of crossing an Alpine pass of moderate
height, where we get near the lasting snows and
are among the bare, inhospitable rocks. There
is much to enjoy — the air, the near peaks and
glaciers, and the distant view. But many must
have received another impression — of the insur-
gent nature of life. Not only are there many
beautiful flowers coming up at the thinned edge
of the snow on most inhospitable ground, but
there is a rich insect life and quite a number of
birds, besides hundreds of things unseen. Very
conspicuous are the large, white-bellied Alpine
swifts, perhaps the most rapid of all birds in
their flight, continually swirling about in the cold
air, with a note of victory in their cry, the very
emblems of insurgent life. Shy marmots whistle
among the rocks and strange flocks of white moths
float up in the mist, rising like the souls of animals

186 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

that have died far below. Everything is unpropi-
tious, yet life is abundant; we feel what Berg-
son calls the Slan, the spring, the impetus that
is characteristic of livingness. We feel the in-
surgent, indomitable, self-assertive character of liv-
ing organisms, — something foreign to the purely
physical.

On the links, perhaps nearer home for most of
us, the whole surface of the grass is sometimes
covered for acres with threads of gossamer. If
we bend down we see the earth quivering as far
as the eye can reach. In some of the hollows
still unsunned, we see what R. L. Stevenson meant
by "the fairy wheels and threads of cobwebs
dew-bediamonded." When the sun catches the
quivering threads, the silvery robe changes to
one of gold. Who can see this without thinking
of Goethe's words about Nature: "She moves
and works above and beneath, working and weav-
ing, an endless motion, birth and death, an infi-
nite ocean, a changeful web, a glowing life." The
beauty of it is increased, not decreased, if we
happen to know a little about the natural history
of gossamer, for most of these threads are the
residues of the ballooning activity of thousands
of small spiders. The sight as we see it is a good
emblem of the intricacy of the web of life.

Three examples are as good as three hundred,
for what we mean is simple enough. Whether

SCIENCE AND ART 1ST

we watch the literal myriads of starlings circling
over one of their favourite resorts, resembling
from a mile off the thick smoke writhing over a
crater, or a swarm of locusts darkening the sky
with a thick curtain of wings, we feel the abun-
dance of life. When we watch the flying fishes
rising in hundreds before the prow of the steamer,
like grasshoppers before us as we walk through a
rich meadow; or the storm-petrels flying over the
waves with dangling feet, never touching land
except to nest; or the salmon leaping the falls;
or the elvers on their journey upstream; we feel
the insurgence of life. When we gaze at the cut
stem of a huge American Sequoia, whose annual
rings show us that it was a sapling a few years
after the fall of Rome, we are in the presence of
another form of the Will to Live. And what
shall we say of the emotional value of looking
backward over the history of organisms, to see
life slowly creeping upwards through the ages,
adapting itself to every niche of opportunity,
expressing itself with increasing freedom and
fulness, with more and more emergence of Mind?
Wherever we turn in our Natural History we
are brought up against the abundance, the insur-
gence, the effectiveness, the intricacy, and the
mystery of life — in all of which, in addition to
the great gift of unsolved problems, there is
unstinted food for fancy, an unending supply of

188 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the raw materials of poetry, and a continual
reinvigoration of those primary and fundamental
Nature impressions without which we cannot
really make our heritage our own. And when
what Science gives us is transfigured by Art,
then — if we may wrest a little the words of an
artistic genius: "The very aspect of the world
will change to our startled eyes. . . . Dragons
will wander about in waste places, and the phoe-
nix will soar from her nest of fire into the air.
We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk and see
the jewel in the toad's head. Champing his
gilded oats, the hippogriff will stand in our stalls,
and over our heads will float the blue-bird singing
of beautiful and impossible things, of things that
are lovely and that never happen, of things that
are not and that should be."

OPPOSITION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND FEELING.
— We have been trying to suggest, indirectly
rather than formally, that Science and Art are
complementary. Science has a great deal to offer
to Art in the way of raw materials, — and these
of a kind that Art is ennobled in working with
them. On the other hand, Science is cold with-
out Art. But while this is so, it cannot be denied
that the artistic and the scientific mood are
in some measure opposed. There is an antithesis
— which easily becomes an antipathy — between
them. The reason for this is obvious: Science

SCIENCE AND ART 189

aims at being unemotional and impersonal; Art
is intrinsically emotional and personal.

We have spoken of the pleasure which Man has
in the contemplation and study of Nature, but
it must be granted that the scientific mood often
intrudes on our delight, elbowing us away from
the emotional window. Yet the end is always
that the window is widened. Darwin once ex-
pressed the delight he had when on a rare occa-
sion he surrendered himself under the trees to
the child's pleasure of just watching the birds
and insects and all the rest, without vexing him-
self for once over the problems of origin. But how
he has widened the emotional window for man-
kind, for all who feel the grandeur of the evolu-
tion-idea!

Keats could not forgive Newton for robbing
mankind of the wonder of the rainbow, — but
when minor mysteries disappear, greater mysteries
stand confessed. Science never destroys wonder,
but only shifts it, higher and deeper. When the
half-Gods go, the Gods arrive, to the aesthetic
as well as to the religious mood. For it is our
experience that there is always something finer,
higher, grander than we saw at first. Should
we not get back oftener to the emotional reali-
zation of height above height, which is expressed
in Emerson's picture of the little child looking
up through the maple branches? —

190 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

M-*

"Over his head were the maple buds,
And over the tree was the moon,
And over the moon were the starry studs
That drop from the angels' shoon."

Our general position is a very simple one. We
are enthusiastic believers in the value of Science
in furnishing descriptive formulae which facili-
tate both our intellectual and our practical grasp
of Nature. But we do not feel that the general-
izations of Science are by themselves satisfying
to us. Rightly or wrongly we share the ordinary
human longing for explanations, and we are not
affected by being told that it is an unhealthy
appetite. We believe that nature-poetry and
religious feeling are alike complementary to
Science. Both aim at getting beyond Science by
other methods, intuitive and instinctive rather
than intellectual — and we do not think that they
fail.

SUMMAKY. — There are three relations between
Science and Art: (1) there is a scientific study of
(esthetics; (2) Science has enormous stores of what
may be called the raw materials of Art; and (3)
there is an interesting psychological opposition
between the two moods. ^Esthetics is a psychological
science which inquires into the characteristics of
that familiar experience which we call enjoying
Nature or Art9 and of the rarer experience of pro-

SCIENCE AND ART 191

ductive artists. Man's emotional relation to Nature
is primal and fundamental. The fundamental and
ancient impressions are of the world-power, of the
immensities, of the pervading order, and of the
universal flux. To these modern science has added
impressions of manifoldness, intricacy, inter-related-
ness, and evolution. Nature is more than a mirror
of our moods; the fundamental impressions are
impersonal. While they have scientific validity,
they are hardly less important in supplying the
raw materials of poetry. Yet there is undoubted
opposition between the scientific and the artistic
mood; when either is in the saddle it must keep the
other at a spear's length.

CHAPTER VII

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

"Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles; and
thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly
touch. Lodge immaterials in thy head; ascend
into invisibles; fill thy spirit with spirituals,
with the mysteries of faith, the magnalities of
religion, and thy life with the honour of God.'*
— SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

The Aim of Science and the Attitude of Religion — From
Practical Problems to Religion — From Emotional Strain
to Religion — From the Riddles of the Universe to Religion
— The Voices of Nature — The Conflict between Science
and Religion — Herbert Spencer's Position — Contributions
of Science to Religion — Summary.

MUCH has been written on the relations be-
tween Science and Religion, and the history of
the so-called conflict between them is long. What
we propose to do in this short chapter is to explain
a certain point of view which appears to us to
make for clearness of thought. Our view is that
Science and Religion are incommensurables, that
there is no true antithesis between them. Let
us explain.

192

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

THE AIM OF SCIENCE AND THE ATTITUDE OF
RELIGION. — As we have already seen, the aim
of Science is to discover the general laws of whaft
goes on, to formulate the sequences in the simplest
possible terms, — terms which are either the im-
mediate data of experience or verifiably derived
from these. It has a definite aim, which is to
describe things as they are and as they have been,
and to discover the laws of all processes; it has
definite methods of observation and experiment;
it has its own "universe of discourse" which does
not include transcendental concepts and offers n@
ultimate explanations.

We cannot define Religion, but we use the
word to include all recognition — whether practi-
cal, emotional, or intellectual — of an independent
spiritual reality. It is evidently something alto-
gether different from Science; it is beyond the
high tide-mark of everyday emotion and it is on
the far side of intellectual curiosity.

Religion implies a realization of a higher order
of things than those of sense-experience, and it
has the usual three sides of feeling, intellectual
conviction, and activity. "Religion," said ProL
James, "has meant many things in human history*
... I use the word in the supernaturalist senses
as declaring that the so-called order of nature,
which constitutes this world's experience, is only
one portion of the total universe, and that there

2S4 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

stretches beyond this visible world an unseen
world of which we now know nothing positive,
but in its relation to which the true significance
c>f our present mundane life consists. A man's
religious faith (whatever more special items of
doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially
Ms faith in the existence of an unseen order of
some kind in which the riddles of the natural
arder may be found explained" (The Will to
Believe, 1903, p. 51). Prof. A. E. Taylor writes:
** Specifically religious emotion, as we can detect
it both in our own experience, if we happen to
possess the religious 'temperament,' and in the
devotional literature of the world, appears to
be essentially a mingled condition of exaltation
and humility arising from an immediate sense of
communion and co-operation with a power greater
and better than ourselves, in which our ideas of
good find completer realization than they every
obtain in the empirically known time-order"
{Elements of Metaphysics, 1903, p. 390).

Taking these descriptions as typical we see
that Religion includes what a man does, and feels,
and thinks when he has reached the limit of his
ordinary practical, emotional, and intellectual
tether. It transcends the ordinary and implies a
certain exaltation of feeling — apart from which
its activity, its art, its ideas are quite undis-
eussable. Its language is not that of the street,

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IDS

nor of the studio, nor of the laboratory. And
just as it is impossible to speak two languages
at once, so it is false antithesis to contrast
scientific and religious interpretations, — they are
incommensurable.

We wish in a simple historical way to consider
some of the pathways that have led and still
lead men to religious experience. In this way we
may be able to discern in part how it is that the
growth of Science influences Religion, although
they are incommensurables. We would remind
ourselves and our readers that the whole subject
should be treated with reverence and sympathy,
for it is hardly possible to exaggerate the august
role of religion in human life. Whatever be our
views, we must recognize that just as the great
mathematicians and metaphysicians represent
the aristocracy of human intellect, so the great
religious geniuses represent the aristocracy of
human emotion. And in this connection it is
probably useful to bear in mind that in all dis-
cussions about religious ideas or feelings we should
ourselves be in an exalted mood, and yet "with
a compelling sense of our own limitations," and
of the vastness and mysteriousness of the world.

FROM PRACTICAL PROBLEMS TO RELIGION. —
Man has three main relations with Nature and
with his fellow-men, — practical, emotional, and
intellectual — and along each of these three lines

190 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

there is a pathway to religion. For untold ages
Man has been dependent upon Nature, and she
lias had many hard lessons to teach him as to
food and safety, as to health and conduct. Na-
ture has trained her "insurgent son" so that he
has entered more and more fully into his kingdom.
This has happened partly because Man listened
ta good purpose to the voices of Nature and to
voices which do not belong to Nature at all, but
partly because Man, having in him the central
secret of life which we call variability, has changed
progressively from generation to generation as he
has been subjected to Nature's sifting in the Strug-
gle for Existence. These three words, which tell
hah* of pain and half of happiness, mean for Man
that he fought with wild beasts till he worsted
them or tamed them, that at great cost he sifted
*mt the wholesome from the poisonous herbs,
that, cowering and crouching for ages, he watched
the elemental forces of Nature till he wrested from
them their secrets, that he has been to his fellows,
too, since the beginning, the strangest mixture
of self-assertiveness and sympathy, and that he
has kept up an age-long endeavour after well-
being — always at his best when rowing hard
against the stream.

Nature's has been a stern school; she has let
no slackness go unpunished; and the voice that
we hear echoing down the ages is Struggle, En-

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 10T

deavour, Struggle. Sparing only those who wiH
accept the life of ease — which we call parasitism
— Nature has always tended to eliminate the
sluggish, the unbalanced, the uncontrolled, the
unwholesome. Wild animals in Nature have para-
sites, but the occurrence of organic disease amongst
them is rare, and its elimination is rapid. Nature
is all for health. And for those who get anything
of a fair start, health is a curiously sensitive index
of morals, — and not for the lower reaches only.

Civilization has indeed mitigated the severity
of Nature's Spartan methods, and has thrown off
the yoke of Natural Selection, but it has not
put an end to struggle nor the need for it. We
interfere with Nature's winnowing at every turn,
and we are awakening to realize the penalty we
have to pay for having abandoned Nature's
policy without adopting a really humaner one of
our own. We are face to face with ugly and terri-
ble social arrears — the results of our easy-going
regime in which superiority does not necessarily
profit by the rewards of superiority, in which
inferiority is shielded from the evils it entails.
Since we cannot return to Nature's stern regime;
which Plat* approved, it behoves us more strenu-
ously to substitute for Natural Selection a similar
method on a higher turn of the spiral — namely, a
stringent policy of Rational and Social Selection
which will not be afraid to be firm in the present

198 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

so that we may be less cruel to the future. We
cannot return to Nature's tactics, but we must
adhere to her strategy or perish miserably.

Huxley insisted with his usual incisiveness
that our only chance of ethical progress was to
combat the cosmic process, for what he saw in
Nature was a vast gladiatorial show, a ubiquitous
Ishmaelitism, every living creature for itself and
extinction taking the hindmost. But he did not
adequately appreciate the fact that throughout
the struggle for existence in Nature, there is often
a pathway to survival and success through in-
creased co-operation, kindliness, and mutual aid,
as well as through increased competition and
self-assertion. And it is this line of combination
and mutual aid that man must especially follow;
it is the one he has followed in making some of his
greatest advances.

Moreover, is it not generally admitted that
the moral ideal is one of self-realization by work-
ing for our social group, by being good citizens
in fact, — a self-realization which implies our
private subordination to the general weal? And
is not this the deeper aspect of Nature's strategy,
that the individual living creature realizes itself
in its inter-relations, and has to submit to being
lost that the welfare of the whole may be served?
There is much indeed to be said for the thesis:
that the ideals of ethical progress — through love

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

and sociality, co-operation and sacrifice, may be
interpreted not as mere Utopias contradicted by
experience, but as the highest expressions of the
central evolutionary process of the natural world-

To return to our general theme, we must ad-
mit that for long ages Man learned in a hard
school, and that the severity of the lessons often
brought him to his knees. It seems to be an
historical fact that many a man has become
religious when he reached the limit of his practical
endeavour and was baffled. When our naive an-
cestors had done all they could and felt themselves
powerless and were afraid, they offered gifts,
or sacrifices, or prayers. It is surely true that
the fear of Nature has sometimes led men to the
fear of the Lord.

But as Man has become more and more master
of Nature, he has ceased to offer sacrifice or to
pray for rain; and this pathway to religion is
not so well trodden now as it was in ancient days.
Let us think vividly of our ancestors — living in
caves, fearful of wild beasts, often dying of
hunger or of poison, without wood-work or metals,
without fire, without foresight, and quite unable
to look to the general weal. What a contrast
between this picture and our life to-day. For
now-a-days, the serpent that bites Man's heel is
in nine cases out of ten microscopic; year by year
Man increases his mastery over the physical

gOO INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

forces; he coins wealth out of the thin air; he
annihilates distance with his deep devices; he
makes the ether carry his messages; he is extend-
ing his kingdom to the heavens; and he is making
experiments on the control of life. And there is
nothing to lead us to believe that Man has more
than begun to enter into his kingdom.

The increasing mastery of Nature and the as-
sociated enormous increase in human comfort
and prosperity must be traced to the application
of science, and perhaps this is one of the indirect
ways in which scientific development hinders
sather than helps the growth of religious feeling.
This is a very simple consideration, but surely
one of importance, that the scientific strengthen-
ing of Man's foothold in the struggle for existence
tends, for rougher minds at least (and "we are
not all the finest Parian"), to close one of the
pathways to religion. In saying this we are not
unaware that the practical tasks ahead are stern
enough. For man has still a very imperfect
mastery of himself and our civilization is full
of misery. In face of the often terrible failures
of human endeavour, the element of tragedy
in things as they are, and the chill that follows
the vision of our fair earth and all that it contains
becoming cold and cindery as the moon, many a
one of great repute in the world of science — we
think of men like Clerk Maxwell or Kelvin — seeks

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 201

to steady himself in the thought of some Abiding
Reality, saying as of yore, "I will lift up mine
eyes unto the hills."

FROM EMOTIONAL STRAIN TO RELIGION. — We
have already spoken of Nature's appeal to the
human emotions, — which seems to us to be one
of the big formative influences in human evo-
lution. Admitting that the emotional note varies
with our science, from age to age, and from race
to race, we venture to say that a love of Nature
is an essential human relation — lost for a while
in ultra-urban conditions — which makes all the
world kin, and is one of the saving graces of life.

Our present point is that the sense of wonder,
for instance, in the presence of Nature, which
lies near the roots of science and of philosophy,
is and will continue to be one of the footstools
of religion. Nature is at times so overpowering
in its beauty or in its awesomeness, that we feel
it too big for our humanity. Thus at the limit
of his emotional tension Man has often become
a worshipper. Some indeed — poets and painters
and musicians — find relief in their art, and in this
some maintain that there is an essentially reli-
gious quality. What seems to us quite clear when
we consider such magnificent pieces of poetic
literature as the Nature-Psalms is this, that men
surcharged with emotion in the contemplation
of Nature may keep their sanity by finding a

202 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

religious expression. To the author of Psalm
xxix, for instance, the thunder-storm that passed
over the country was a revelation of God. We
miss the whole point if we suppose that the poet
meant to say that the thunder was caused by
God speaking. "He was not in the passionless
and prosaic state of seeking an explanation of the
thunder; he was expressing religious experience
of the most exalted kind." He was far beyond
the confines of science, he has been greatly thrilled
by the storm, and in his exalted state of feeling
his emotion became religious, he heard God's
voice.

Similarly in Man's emotional relations with
his fellows there are heights of joy and depths of
sorrow from which the transition to religious
feeling is natural, to certain temperaments at
least.

Can it be said that the development of science
has in any way affected the frequency with which
the emotional pathway to religion is followed?
It may be that in the rapid extension of scien-
tific thinking and scientific knowledge some have
lost the sense of wonder that is due to relative
ignorance without gaining that which comes
from knowledge. It may also be that the exten-
sion of psychological analysis to all manner of
emotions has induced a curious self-consciousness
that inhibits spontaneity of feeling.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 203

TVe think, however, that if there is a decadence
of delight and reverence in the presence of Nature,
it must be due rather to the conditions of modern
urban civilization than to the spread of Science.
Many men, some by choice, and some under
coercion, have got quite out of touch with Nature,
to their own great loss. For Man was cradled
and brought up in Nature, and if, because of
civilization, he cannot any longer continue to live
in the old home, it is a condition of emotional
sanity that he should periodically return there,
as the migratory birds do.% It is this old-estab-
lished association, we think, that gives deep
import to that "uprush of feeling from below
the ordinary level of consciousness" which we
experience when we allow the beauty of Nature
to play upon us. In Emerson's transcendental
language, "Nature is the organ through which
the universal spirit speaks to the individual."

FROM THE RIDDLES OF THE UNIVERSE TO RE-
LIGION.— Having referred to Man's practical and
emotional relations with Nature and with his
fellows, we come to the third relation, which is
intellectual or scientific. The first voice of Na-
ture is Endeavour, the second is Enjoy, the third
is Enquire. For hundreds of thousands of years,
Nature has been setting Man problems, leading
him gradually from the practical to the more
abstract. On the one side there is Man — inquisi-

304 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

live like an animal, but with deeper devices; on
the other side there is Nature,- — a rare collection
of riddles. The sciences are the solutions.

In olden times when the natural sciences were
young, when few methods of investigation were
known, Man found himself hemmed in by the
unknown and mysterious, so oppressively at
times that a religious formulation was sought
as a welcome refuge. At the end of his intel-
lectual tether, Man has never ceased to become
religious.

Now-a-days, however, the rapid development
of Science has cleared away a hundred minor
mysteries. Problem after problem has been
solved, and the correctness of the solutions has
been verified in practical mastery of Nature.
Man's intellectual tether has been greatly length-
ened, and there are not a few who give the
ignorant to understand that most of the enigmas
of Nature have found their answers.

But, as we have already seen, the solutions that
Science offers have obvious limitations. They
do not satisfy most men, who will persist in ask-
ing questions which Science never asks, — ques-
tions about beginnings and ends, about meanings
and values. Let us recall for a moment some of
the limitations. Scientific formulations are always
in terms of something "given" which is unex-
plained. In its historical treatment of things

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 205

Science always begins — not at the beginning, for
that is impossible, but from something "given"
which it does not explain. Moreover, in linking
happenings together, it is only in a limited set of
cases that Science can tell how the result is as it is.

In the common denominator to which Science
reduces things, in the sequences where the result-
ants seem qualitatively different from their ante-
cedents, in the origins from which science starts
in its genealogies, there is mysteriousness. All
our scientific experience is rounded with mystery.
As Sir E. Ray Lankester has said: "No sane man
has ever pretended, since science became a definite
body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope
to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing
whence the mechanism has come, why it is there,
whither it is going, and what may or may not be
beyond and beside it, which our senses are in-
capable of appreciating. These things are not
'explained' by science and never can be."

If we will have for our human satisfaction
some answer to questions such as these, which
lie beyond Science, then it must be a transcendental
answer, and that means for most men, who prefer
to think naively, a religious answer. As Coleridge
said: "All knowledge begins and ends with
wonder, but the first wonder is the child of
ignorance; the second wonder is the parent of
adoration."

206 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

THE VOICES OF NATURE. — Let us draw
together the threads of this simple argument,
which is meant to show how, from the nature of
the case, the progress of science must influence
the growth of the religious mood. Nature is so
great — perhaps infinitely great — that we need
not be too much afraid of verbal personification,
nor of speaking, for purposes of convenience,
of the three voices of Nature when we simply
mean the impulses that come from the threefold
— practical) emotional, and intellectual — relation
between Man and Nature. We are thinking, of
course, of wordless voices, as is said with sub-
lime contradiction in the nineteenth Psalm: "Day
unto day is welling forth speech, and night unto
night is breathing out knowledge; yet there is
no speech, and there are no words; their voice
has no audible sound, yet it resonates over all
the earth."

We have hinted at the historical fact that in
listening to these voices, men have often passed
into religious experience, almost by a kind of
coercion. When a man after extreme struggle
is utterly baffled practically, he may kneel in
prayer; when a man is penetratingly thrilled with
emotion he may be borne by its ecstasy into wor-
ship; and when a man at the end of his scientific
tether is entirely unsatisfied with his formulae —
necessarily as cold as they are true — he may

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 207

pass by a third portal into conviction of religious
truth.

These seem to us to be historical statements.
Though the three pathways indicated may not
be the only ones, nor the best, they are three
pathways along which men have passed to re-
ligion. Not that they lead inevitably to religious
experience, for the practically baffled may become
a resigned and even cheerful^fatalist, the emotion-
ally thrilled may find a solution in some form of
art, and the unsatisfied scientific inquirer may
settle down into a contented positivist. But a
religious result is just as common. In some de-
gree the pathways may be called coercive, indicat-
ing at sort of bad-weather recourse to religion,
but perhaps bad weather of the sort indicated
is part of a normal human experience.

It seems fair to add another consideration,
that in listening to what we have called the three
voices of Nature, man may be disciplined to hear
even more august voices. Man's struggles for
food and foot-hold may give him grit that helps
towards and in much higher grades of endeavour;
to be thrilled with beauty may be a step to loving
goodness; and to try to find out what is scienti-
fically true in Nature may be the beginning of
"waiting patiently upon the Lord."

While we are convinced that to listen to what
we have called the three voices of Nature is a

208 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

normal and necessary discipline of the developing
human spirit, we do not think that Man can find
abiding satisfaction in Nature's voices alone.
Invigorating, inspiring, and instructive they cer-
tainly are, but, as we have seen, they are full of
perplexities, and it is with a certain sad wist-
fulness^that we hear their echoes dying away in
the quietness of our minds like the calls of curlews
on the moorland as they pass farther into the
mist. Happy, then, in that quietness are those
who have what Sir Thomas Browne called "a
glimpse of incomprehensibles, and thoughts of
things which thoughts but tenderly touch."

It must be carefully noted that we have spoken
only of those pathways to religion which the
growth of Science has most directly affected.
We have not spoken of the ethical approach to
religion, by which many take refuge from the
contradictions of moral experience, nor of the
approach to religion which is followed by those
who are able to see in history, and especially in
the Founder of Christianity, a direct Revelation
of what is otherwise only groped after.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELI-
GION.— It was Clerk Maxwell who spoke of the
absurdity of trying to keep "idea-tight compart-
ments" in our minds, and although some men
appear to achieve considerable success in keep-
ing their scientific convictions unrelated to their

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

religious convictions, there is an element of gro-
tesqueness in the feat. Insulation of this sort is
unnatural, and when very successful it is patho-
logical. Obviously our whole life should be cor-
related, and it is the endeavour after unification
that is in part responsible for the long-drawn-
out "conflict between science and religion" — a
conflict which is often deplored, whereas it means
a wholesome keenness of interest and an ideal
of clearness and consistency.

The "conflict between science and religion "
has several forms, which must be distinguished
from one another, (a) In the first place, religious
feeling is usually associated with a content of
beliefs, directly based on religious experience or
dependent on an interpretation of human history
and of Nature. In many cases the beliefs that
rest on interpretation form part of a tradition
accepted unquestioningly by facile minds, or
independently tested by those who are suffi-
cient for such inquiries. To some extent, but to a
continually decreasing extent, these religious
beliefs touch the world of the concrete, and a
clashing with science must arise whenever and
wherever the form of the religious belief is incon-
sistent with the results of science. A typical
instance occurred in the infancy of experimental
science when Galileo's new astronomy could not
but clash with a religious belief which was for

210 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the time being wrapped up with the assumption
that the earth was the steadfast hub of the so-
lar system. Nbw-a-days, however, the religious
mind is not in the least excited over the question
whether the earth goes round the sun, or the sun
round the earth, and this has been one of the
uses of the "conflict between Science and Reli-
gion," that the particular "body" which a reli-
gious idea takes, has been more and more sublimed.
In most cases the religious idea has become clearer
in the process.

We may say, then, that if the form or expres-
sion of a religious belief is contradictory to a well-
established fact in the order of Nature, then
clashing is inevitable. But to see in this an an-
tithesis between the scientific formula and the
religious idea is a misunderstanding.

(6) In the second place, conflict and confusion
have arisen by misguided attempts to combine
religious and scientific formulations in the hope
of thus making things more intelligible. An
instance may be found in the history of theories
of organic evolution. The business of the scien-
tific evolutionist is to show how verifiable factors
may have co-operated to produce the marvellous
results which we see around us to-day. It goes
without saying that this task has not yet been
crowned with success. The results often seem
strangely out of proportion to the known causes,

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

In particular it is difficult to give a scientific
account of the "big lifts" in the history of the
world of life. It gives us pause to think of the
origin of Vertebrates, of Birds, of Mammals, of
Man. We cannot speak with much confidence
of the operative factors. In spite of this unsatis-
factory ignorance, however, the scientific mind
recoils with a jerk from the assumption of "spir-
itual influxes" or mystical powers of any sort
interpolated from outside to help the evolv-
ing organism over the stiles of difficulty. The
scientific task is certainly unfulfilled; it may
be beyond human attainment to complete it;
but we must not try to speak two languages at
©nee.

(c) In the third place, just as religion is often
associated with forms of belief which are unes-
sential to it, and which may be inconsistent with
scientific conclusions, so science often goes beyond
its own sphere and becomes associated with phil-
osophical doctrines which are unessential to it,
and which may conflict with religious convictions.
Thus, to take a familiar instance, materialism
is not a scientific conclusion, but a philosoph-
ical doctrine which many students of science
have embraced. And materialism is inconsistent
with most forms of religious belief and experience.
The point that we wish to make is that the an-
tagonism in this case is not between religion and

INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

science, but between religion and a particular
philosophy.

(d) In the fourth place the application of scien-
tific methods of investigation to the forms of
religious activity, tends, in the eyes of some at
least, to rob them of that mystic atmosphere
apart from which the religious spirit cannot
breathe. The genetic method has penetrated into
the realms of religion, and we read of the evolu-
tion of religious ideas, feelings, and rites. They
are "explained" and their survival is accounted
for. Moreover, the psychologist and even the
physiologist has had his innings, and it seems to
some as if religious phenomena were losing all their
religious character. Like tender plants drawn out
from shadowy recesses, they wither quickly in the
glare of common day. Little wonder, then, that
those to whom religious experience is the greatest
reality of their life should regard science as a foe.

(e) In the fifth place, there is an indubitable
contrast between the scientific and the religious
mood; they cannot be simultaneous; they are
not likely to be equally strong in the same indi-
vidual; and there are reasons why the culture of
the former is not favourable to the latter. It
is important to inquire into these reasons. How
far is the opposition essential and necessary?
How far is it due to the limitations of our faculties
and to misunderstanding?

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 213

It cannot be that Science is satisfied with what
it has done in the way of giving an account of
things, or supposes that it will soon be able to
congratulate itself on having cleared up all myste-
ries and explained everything. That is a view
held only by the vulgar and half-educated. As
we have said so often, Science gives no ultimate
explanations. It is not its business to try to do
so. When Laplace, answering Napoleon's ques-
tion about God, said that he "had no need of
that hypothesis," he obviously meant that that
august concept was foreign to the astronomical
"universe of discourse." Nor can it be said that
Science engenders an irreverent spirit; the biog-
raphies of all the greatest scientific investigators
show the reverse. The irreverent and the un-
wondering are to be found among those who
know least, not among those who know most.
It is true that minor mysteries disappear, or, at
least, that they cease to be mysterious in a super-
ficial way, but it has been the experience of many
a student of Science that when the half -gods go
the gods arrive.

To understand the antithesis we must remember
how our habitual occupation influences the mind.
It is the everyday business of Science to work with
facts, to describe these, testing and measuring,
to search out causes, to discover chains of sequence
— and all in such a way that the work done may

214 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

be universally verifiable by all competent inquir-
ers. A scientific datum should be quite imper-
sonal, and the statement of it should be quite
uncoloured by any emotion. This habitual occu-
pation is bound to react on the organism; it
does not in itself favour that subjectivity which is
characteristic of religious feeling.

We have to remember also that the scientific
spirit has been slowly learning the great lesson,
driven home by positivism — that its formula-
tions must be freed from the vague and verbal.
Science ever brandishes "William of Occam's
razor " : " Entities are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity."

Furthermore, it seems that some importance
must be attached not only to the sceptical habit,
which is distinctively scientific — the testing, veri-
fying spirit — but also to the agnostic frame of
mind. The scientific inquirer is aware of so
many enigmas, so many unsolved or half -solved
problems, that it is almost habitual to him to
say: "I do not know," "I do not understand."
He has learned to refrain from formulation when
the data are insufficient; he is accustomed to be
agnostic. Not that he folds his hands saying,
"We do not know and we shall never know,"
his is an active agnosticism. But being accus-
tomed to patience, and having seen the solution
of much that his forefathers called insoluble,

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

ie will not make haste to adopt transcendental
explanations of particular events. As Prof.
Boutroux puts it: "The history of science proves
that we have a right to affirm a continuity be-
tween what we know and what we do not know.
This is why the expression, * scientifically inexplic-
able,' is really without meaning. A mysterious
force, a miraculous fact, assuming that the fact
exists, what is it but a phenomenon which we
are unable to explain with the help of the laws
that we at present know. If the impossibility is
confirmed, science will go on to seek for other
laws."

In this connection, we venture to quote a
well-known passage from the late Prof. William
James's Will to Believe (1903). "When one turns
to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences,
and sees how it was reared; what thousands of
disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its
mere foundations; what patience and postpone-
ment, what choking down of preference, what sub-
mission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought
into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely
impersonal it stands in its vast augustness, —
then how besotted and contemptible seems every
little sentimentalist who comes blowing his vol-
untary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide
things from out of his private dream! Can we
wonder if those bred in the rugged and manly

216 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

school of science should feel like spewing such
subjectivism out of their mouths?" We must
remember, however, James's subsequent conclu-
sion that "our passional nature not only lawfully
may, but must, decide an option between prop-
ositions, whenever it is a genuine option that
cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual
grounds.'*

Our own position is this. Science seeks to
answer certain kinds of questions in regard to
Nature and Man and the history of both. These
answers are very far from being complete, for
the world is very large and science is very young.
But even if the answers were as complete all
round as they are already in parts, and if there
were also answers to all the scientific questions
which we do not yet foresee nor know how to ask,
yet they would not be of a kind to satisfy the
whole nature of the ordinary man. We get hints
of complementary answers in poetic and religious
feeling, and we see no reason to believe that the
only approach to Truth or Reality is by the scien-
tific method. The satisfaction we reach in poetic
and religious feeling is transcendental, on a
different plane from scientific satisfaction. It
is unverifiable, incommunicable, mystical, but —
for ourselves — true. In its mystical character
there is danger, but the safeguard is in steadying
the mind with Science and Philosophy — with

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 217

which our poetry and religion must be harmo-
nious. Apart from this, another test of the valid-
ity of our mystical feelings and transcendental
constructions is their value in our life.

HERBERT SPENCER'S POSITION. — As we have
referred to the religious convictions of intellectual
giants like Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin, so
we would in fairness illustrate a different posi-
tion by reference to Herbert Spencer, who also
belonged to the kingdom of genius. Disagree
with his views as one may, one cannot doubt
either the magnitude of his intellect or his pas-
sionate sincerity.

In early days he was an uncompromising critic
of particular theological doctrines and religious
customs, but a wider knowledge convinced him
almost against his will that some sort of religious
cult has been an indispensable factor in social
progress. He looked forward to a stajge in which,
"recognizing the mystery of things as insoluble,
religious organizations will be devoted to ethical
culture.

"Thus I have come more and more to look
calmly on forms of religious belief to which I had,
in earlier days, a pronounced aversion. Holding
that they are in the main naturally adapted to
their respective peoples and times, it now seema
to me well that they should severally live and
work as long as the conditions persist, and, fur-

218 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

ther, that sudden changes of religious institutions,
as of political institutions, are certain to be fol-
lowed by reactions.

"If it be asked why, thinking thus, I have
persevered in setting forth views at variance
with current creeds, my reply is the one elsewhere
made: 'It is for each to utter that which he
sincerely believes to be true, and, adding his
unit of influence to all other units, leave the
results to work themselves out. ' '

Largely, however, Spencer's change of mood
in regard to religious creeds and institutions
resulted from "a deepening conviction that the
sphere occupied by them can never become an
unfilled sphere, but that there must continue to
arise afresh the great questions concerning our-
selves and surrounding things; and that, if not
positive answers, then modes of consciousness
standing in place of positive answers must ever
remain."

We venture to quote a somewhat lengthy
passage because of its quite unique interest
in regard to the relations between science and
religion: —

"By those who know much, more than by those
who know little, is there felt the need for ex-
planation. Whence this process, inconceivable
however symbolized, by which alike the monad

SCIENCE AND RELIGION £19

and the man build themselves up into their
respective structures? What must we say of the
life, minute, multitudinous, degraded, which, cov-
ering the ocean-floor, occupies by far the larger
part of the Earth's area; and which yet, growing
and decaying in utter darkness, presents hundreds
of species of a single type? Or, when we think
of the myriads of years of the Earth's past, during
which have arisen and passed away low forms
of creatures, small and great, which murdering
and being murdered, have gradually evolved,
how shall we answer the question: To what end?
Ascending to wider problems, in which way are
we to interpret the lifelessness of the greater
celestial masses, the giant planets, and the
Sun; in proportion to which the habitable planets
are mere nothings? If we pass from these rela-
tively near bodies to the thirty millions of remote
suns and solar systems, where shall we find a
reason for all this apparently unconscious exist-
ence, infinite in amount compared with the exist-
ence which is conscious — a waste Universe as
it seems? Then behind these mysteries lies the
all-embracing mystery — whence this universal
transformation which has gone on unceasingly
throughout a past eternity and will go on unceas-
ingly throughout a future eternity? And along
with this rises the paralysing thought: What if,
of all that is thus incomprehensible to us, there

220 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

exists no comprehension anywhere? No wonder
that men take refuge in authoritative dogma!

"So is it, too, with our own natures. No less
inscrutable is this complex consciousness which
has slowly evolved out of infantine vacuity —
consciousness which, during the development of
every creature, makes its appearance out of what
seems unconscious matter; suggesting the thought
that consciousness in some rudimentary form is
omnipresent. Lastly come insoluble questions
concerning our own fate: the evidence seeming
so strong that the relations of mind and nerv-
ous structure are such that the cessation of the
one accompanies dissolution of the other, while,
simultaneously, comes the thought, so strange
and so difficult to realize, that with death there
lapses both the consciousness of existence and the
consciousness of having existed.

"Thus religious creeds, which in one way or
other occupy the sphere that rational interpre-
tation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the more
it seeks, I have come to regard with a sympathy
based on community of need: feeling that dis-
sent from them results from inability to accept
the solutions offered, joined with the wish that
solutions could be found" (Spencer, 1893).

CONTRIBUTIONS OF SCIENCE TO RELIGION.
— Some people are disappointed because scien-
tific investigation gives no direct support to

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 221

religious convictions, but this shows a misunder-
standing of what is meant by science and by reli-
gion. Science establishes conclusions which the
religious mood may utilize, just as philosophy
utilizes them, and transfigure, just as poetry
transfigures them; but it is the common con-
fession of the scientific mood throughout all the
ages that we cannot "by searching find out God."

But is it not much that Science discloses more
and more fully the intelligibility, the orderliness,
and the progressiveness of Nature? These are
big intellectual assets. Is it not much that Science
discloses more and more fully the wonder of the
world — the immensities and the intricacies, the
changing order and the orderly changes besides
all the beauty in depths and heights which the
unscientific eye cannot see? These are big emo-
tional assets. Is there not practical value, too,
both of encouragement and warning, in the sci-
entific view that it is an ascent, not a descent,
that is behind us — and hi front of us too, we hope?
Everything seems to indicate that it is an increas-
ingly controllable future that lies before us here,
and it surely adds zest to our life to feel that we
can share in the "increasing purpose" of evolu-
tion, in the working out of what seems like a
great and beautiful thought.

It is also fair to recognize that Science has
done well by Religion in eliminating much that

INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

is superstitious, and it seems very unlikely that
its useful function in this direction has been
completed. As the late Prof. W. James said:
"What mankind at large most lacks is criticism
and caution, not faith." "What some," he went
on to say, "most need is that their faiths should
be broken up and ventilated, that the north-west
wind of science should get into them and blow
their sickliness and barbarism away."

SUMMARY. — Science and Religion are incom-
mensurables, and there is no true antithesis between
them — they belong to different universes of discourse.
Science is descriptive and offers no ultimate ex-
planation; Religion is mystical and interpretative,
implying a realization of a higher order of things
than those of sense-experience. Men are led to
religion along many pathways — from the contra-
dictions of the moral Iife9 from the facts of his-
tory, and from what is experienced at the limits of
practical endeavour, emotional strain, and intel-
lectual inquiry. It is not difficult to see why the
rapid development of Science should have affected,
for a time of transition at least, the frequency with
which men tread the last-named three pathways to
religion — namely, from baulked struggle, strained
emotion, and baffled inquiry. The so-called "con-
flict between science and religion" depends in part
on a clashing of particular expressions of religious
belief with facts of science, or on a clashing of

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 223

particular scientific philosophies with religious
feeling, or on attempts to combine in one statement
scientific and religious formulations, or on the ap-
plication of psychological inquiry to the phases of
religious experience, or on the contrast of the two
moods. But the bulk of the conflict is due to a mis-
understanding, to a false antithesis between incom-
mensurables. While Science can give no direct
support to religious convictions, it establishes con-
clusions which the religious mood may utilize, just
as philosophy utilizes them, and transfigure, just
as poetry transfigures them.

CHAPTER VIII

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE

"The end of our foundation [Salomon's House
in the New Atlantis] is the knowledge of causes
and the secret motions of things; and the enlarg-
ing of the bounds of human empire, to the effect-
ing of all things possible." — FRANCIS BACON.

Science for its own Sake — Science and Practical Lore —
Science and Occupation — Illustrations of the Practical
Utility of the Sciences — Danger of Utilitarian Criteria —
Fundamental Value of "Theoretical Science" — Historical
Illustrations — Socialized Science — Summary.

SCIENCE FOR ITS OWN SAKE. — To see things
and happenings clearly, both in themselves and
in their relations to other things and happenings,
is the aim of science. And no one who enjoys
scientific work — whether at the humble level of
accurate description, or at the high level of
discovering a formula — cares to hear much about
the "utility of science." No artist likes utili-
tarian valuations of his art, and the scientist
understands him in this at least. I also am an
artist, he says, or words to that effect, meaning
(1) that a scientific investigation is, like a picture,
224

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE

an endeavour to get at the setting and significance
of things or events; (2) that there is a delight
and an endeavour in scientific workmanship that
is its own reward; and (3) that in the higher
reaches of science, the discovery of a formula, a
general law, a pedigree, a homology, an inter-
relation— whatever it may be — is in some measure
a personal achievement.

"Science for its own sake," like "Art for Art's
sake," is an autonomy worth fighting for. Both
scientific inquiry and artistic device are natural
and necessary expressions of the evolving human
spirit, and for this reason a utilitarian apology
for either is gratuitous. Scientific inquiry is
noble in itself, and it is its own reward. As
Bacon said: "We see in all other pleasures there
is satiety, and after they be used their verdure
departeth. . . . But of knowledge there is no
satiety, but satisfaction and appetite are per-
petually interchangeable, and therefore it ap-
peareth to be good in itself simply without
fallacy or accident."

SCIENCE AND PRACTICAL LORE. — Historical in-
quiry shows that the concrete sciences grew out
of practical lore, and that even after they began
to stand on their own legs as independent theo-
retical interpretations of Nature, they have often
received fresh stimulus by coming back to prac-
tical problems. Did not botany arise out of

226 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

herb-gathering and gardening, and has not
botany as a science got an uplift from all its
many contacts with human needs? We think
of yeast and fermentations, of bacteria and dis-
eases, of diatoms and fish-supply, of breeding
experiments and the improvement of our food-
plants, of plant-associations and inter-relations
in their bearing on the perennial problem of
making the most of the Earth for our children as
well as for ourselves.

The lore of the hunter, the fisher, the shepherd
is older than all zoology, and every thoughtful
naturalist will agree that his science runs a risk
of losing vitality and real progressiveness if it
gets too far away from the actual life of animals
as it is lived in Nature. Nay more, that just as a
stimulus has been periodically given to zoological
studies by the return of a great expedition, such
as the Challenger, with its enthralling splendour of
animate spoils, so the tackling of some practical
problem of real moment has often been followed
by some impulse to pure science.

It is perhaps going too far to say with Prof.
Espinas: "Practice has always gone in advance
of theory"; but there is no doubt that science
and practice act and react most beneficially upon
one another. Science has grown out of practical
lore, and it has nothing to gain, but much to lose,
by forgetting its origins.

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE

Perhaps, however, there is still some danger
— though it is rapidly diminishing — of practical
lore refusing the aid of science. The old farmer,
who has made his fields and his stock pay for
half a century, has no use for the new science of
the living earth, which teems with Protozoa as
well as with Bacteria, and he has no appetite for
Mendelism. The old fisherman, who has some-
times an almost uncanny skill in reading the
riddle of the sea — in finding out where he is and
where the fish are likely to be — is not athirst for
ichthyological instruction, though, as a matter of
fact, when he is approached sympathetically, and
as one who has something to impart as well as
as to receive, he often proves himself an effective
student. We need not multiply examples, for the
point is a simple one.

Much of the practical lore is thoroughly scien-
tific though it may never have been stated. The
use of instruction is to make it conscious, com-
municable, and more plastic, and to get down to
the principles which it unconsciously illustrates.
For wonderful as is the lore that comes from
instinctive insight to start with and long experi-
ence to back this up, it not only tends to die with
its possessor, but like instinct, as contrasted with
intelligence, in animals, it is apt to be thrown out
of gear by some slight change in the conditions of
application.

228 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

At the same time we feel bound to admit that
the endeavour to formulate practical lore is not
likely to have more than partial success, for there
is an unanalysable element in its higher reaches.
This is well known in the case of some of the ex-
perienced physicians of the older school whose
insight in diagnosis has often excited the won-
der and envy of their more scientific successors.
Perhaps there was sometimes more hard work
behind it than was usually supposed, but it seems
certain that in many fields there are men with
a remarkable power of intuition, born not made,
of whose methods even self -analysis can give no
account.

There is no doubt that all the sciences — not
excepting psychology and sociology — sprang from
concrete experience. Mathematics is abstract
enough, but what does its history show? "Man
began arithmetic with experience of the number
of his fingers and toes, and geometry with expe-
rience of the magnitude of his hands, feet, and
arms. He went on to use these concrete bod-
ies as standards to measure other bodies. Geom-
etry means the measurement of lands; and the
most ancient Egyptian book of mathematics, the
papyrus of Ahmes, about 1700 B.C., measures
barns, pyramids, and obelisks, and treats solid
bodies before proceeding to abstract surfaces.
Mathematics, in short, began with concrete bodies,

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 229

such as could only be reached by means of expe-
rience, and only gradually receded from the con-
crete to the abstract, to the units of abstract
arithmetic, and the points of abstract geometry.
The Greeks achieved this analysis from concrete
to abstract, and thus converted mathematics from
analysis to synthesis, which begins with the ab-
stract unit as origin of number, and with the
abstract point as simpler than the line. But
the order of discovery was from the concrete and
analytical, although afterwards the order of de-
velopment was from the abstract and synthetic "
(Prof. T. Case, 1906, p. 6).

It is good history that the sciences sprang out
of the lore of occupations, and it is also a fact of
no small ethical importance. " We cannot get
away from our ancestors. Just as a physical
scientist is a smith, so is the botanist a farmer
and shepherd, the zoologist a huntsman, the geog-
rapher a sailor, the historian a scald, the doctor
a wizard or medicine-man, and the lawyer a
scribe. As for the mathematician, his material
—the oldest science of all — has been drawn from
such a variety of occupations that, if he vividly
grasps the spirit of the history of his science
(though, unfortunately, this is rarely the case),
he should find himself in a very real sense the
heir to all the ages, and become imbued with
sympathy for all occupations." (Branford, 1904.)

230 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

SCIENCE AND OCCUPATION. — In an address
with this title (Journal of Education, June, 1904),
Mr. Benchara Branford expounds "this deep
truth, that all theory, all knowledge, all the broad
groups of sciences, originally sprang from the
experience gathered by man from one or other
of his numerous occupations." "We must not
imagine that science floats, as it were, in the clouds,
serenely isolated from the hum and bustle and
occupations of the busy world, and developing
in some mysterious way of its own." "Science
ultimately sprang, and is continually springing,
from the desires and efforts of men to increase
their skill in their occupations by understanding
the eternal principles that underlie all dealings
of man with Nature and of man with his fellow-
men." "And if science ultimately has sprung
from, and is continually springing anew from,
occupations, science has repaid the debt both
by rendering those who follow her teaching more
skilled in their occupations and by actually giving
rise by her discoveries to absolutely new types
of occupations. One of the great conditions of
human progress is this unceasing reciprocal
relationship between occupation and science,
each constantly producing and being produced
by the other. Out of many instances I shall
choose one striking example of the development
of science from occupation.

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE

"Monge was born the son of a French pedlar
about 1750. The construction of a plan he made
of his native town brought the boy under the
notice of a colonel of Engineers, who got him
admitted to one of the military schools. His
humble birth precluded him from receiving a
commission in the Army, but he was taught
surveying and drawing; though he was told he
was not sufficiently well born to be allowed to
attempt problems which required mathematical
calculations. At last his opportunity came. He
observed that all the plans of fortifications were
constructed by long and tedious arithmetical
calculations from the original observed measure-
ments. Monge substituted for these a geomet-
rical process he had invented which produced
the plan so quickly that the officer in charge re-
fused to receive it, because professional etiquette
required that no less than a certain time should
be spent over making these drawings. When
once examined, its obvious superiority was recog-
nized. This geometrical process discovered by
Monge was nothing less than a new branch of
geometry — known to students of engineering as
practical solid geometry — a science in which, by
the now familiar method of plan and elevation,
a solid object can be represented adequately
by construction on a plane — a method whose
practical, or, let me say, occupational, value

INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

can scarcely be over-estimated, and the further
development of which by Monge had far-reach-
ing effects upon mathematical science itself.
Here we have a new and distinct branch of
science springing directly from the occupation
of war, on its engineering side."

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PRACTICAL UTILITY
OF THE SCIENCES. — The long list of what are
called "Applied Sciences" — a term which Huxley
hated so heartily — shows the number and the
variety of the practical utilizations of Science.
We cannot give more than a few examples,
which may be multiplied by reference to other
scientific volumes, in this Library. Thus while
every one knows more or less clearly that astron-
omy still continues to be of use in navigation, we
find in Mr. Hinks's fascinating volume that the
science also earns its living by helping the sur-
veyor and the map-maker, and by supplying the
world with accurate time. Even to ships upon
the sea the astronomers now tell the time of day
by wireless telegraphy.

Numerous chemical arts — such as brewing,
soap-making and dyeing — were practised before
there was a science of chemistry, but the multi-
plication of these under direct scientific stimulus
is past telling. Think only, for instance, of the
cyanide processes for the recovery of gold from
its ores, of the technical development of ben-

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 233

zene and its derivatives, of the electro-chemical
industry, of the improvement of steel-making,
of the synthetic production of substances like
indigo which were formerly procurable only as
natural products, and of the utilization of the
nitrogen of the air in the manufacture of ferti-
lizers. Among the many practical benefits
resulting from the development of physics, we
naturally think first of some of the more recent —
the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy,
electric motors, and flying machines. From the
sciences of the earth man has profited enormously
— for they have led him to stores of coal and iron
and other buried treasures. From oceanography
already there are conclusions of importance in con-
nection with fisheries, and meteorology, another
very young science, has already to be thanked for
much saving of life and wealth through its pro-
phetic weather reports.

On the biological side we may mention as
diverse illustrations, the applications of bacte-
riology in surgery, hygiene, agriculture, and the
preservation or improvement of food; the appli-
cation of "protozoology" to the study of such
diseases as p£brine in silkworms and sleeping-
sickness in man; the influence on medicine of the
physiological discovery of internal secretions like
those of the thyroid gland and the suprarenals;
the study of the whole economy of the sea in

234 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

relation to various kinds of fisheries; and the
utilization of Mendel's principles of heredity in
the practical improvement of domestic animals
and cultivated plants.

In his Wonderful Century Dr. Alfred Russel
Wallace made an interesting comparison between
the practically important applications of science
in the nineteenth century and those in all pre-
ceding centuries. Among new departures of the
nineteenth century he reckoned thirteen as of
first importance, namely — railways, steam-navi-
gation, electric telegraphs, the telephone, friction
matches, gas lighting, electric lighting, photog-
raphy, the phonograph, Rontgen rays, spectrum
analysis, the use of anaesthetics, and the use of
antiseptics. In all preceding time he reckoned
only five inventions of the first rank — the tele-
scope, the printing press, the mariner's compass,
Arabic numerals, and alphabetical writing, to
which may be added the steam-engine and the
barometer, "making seven in all, as against
thirteen in one single century." Perhaps this
estimate was a little more generous to the nine-
teenth century than to those before it, but it is
certainly fair enough to bring out in a very inter-
esting way the concomitance of the progress of
science and practically important inventions.

DANGER OF UTILITARIAN CRITERIA. — The list
of practical benefits which Science has con*

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 235

ferred on man might be greatly lengthened, but
what we have given is perhaps sufficiently repre-
sentative, and there is much risk of over-empha-
sizing the utilitarian criteria. The too intensely
practical man has got so accustomed to the
fruits of Science that he is apt to forget that these
cannot be forthcoming if the roots die. There-
fore to the critic who growls over the time spent
on studying sea-weeds, when "what we want is
more wheat," over embryological research in-
stead of fish-hatching, over the theoretical puz-
zles of geology instead of the search for more
coal and iron, we must answer, first, that man
does not live by bread alone; second, that he
must be patient if his desired practical results
are to be sure; third, that Science is a unity, and
the theoretical foundation is essential if there
is to be progressive practical application; and,
fourth, that, as a matter of fact, it has often been
from the most unpromising theoretical investi-
gations that great practical discoveries have
come. Even for the sake of practice, Science
should never submit to the over-practical man's
canon which makes immediate utility a strin-
gent criterion of worthiness.

To-day, as much as ever, when the enthusi-
asm for "practical results" is so strong, we do
well to remember the distinction drawn by Bacon,
nearly four hundred years ago, between those

236 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

results of Science which are light-giving (lucifera)
and those which are of direct practical utility
(fructifera). Regarding which, he came to the
memorable conclusion: "Just as the vision of
light itself is something more excellent and beau-
tiful than its manifold use, so without doubt the
contemplation of things as they are, without
superstition or imposture, without error or con-
fusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole
harvest of inventions." It is an intolerable nar-
row-mindedness which supposes that a science
can be judged only by its practical fruits and not
also by its virtue of illumination.

FUNDAMENTAL VALUE OF "THEORETICAL SCI-
ENCE."— This little book will not have been
written in vain if it contributes to expose the
pernicious fallacy, which has deceived many,
that science can be pruned of its theoretical
developments and yet continue to bear fruit.
It is supposed by the ignorant that these "efflor-
escences" could be dispensed with — mere luxu-
ries of the intelligence, and out of place in a
utilitarian age. The fact is that they are the
blossoms, which in part become fruits.

One of the deleterious results of the fallacy
is that it has suggested to students and directors
of studies — at all levels — the mistaken policy of
trying to secure a "technical education" with-
out an adequately substantial scientific training.

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 237

Perhaps this is a Nemesis on the heels of ultra-
academic curricula which might have been orien-
tated in relation to practical professional problems
without any loss in the thoroughness or all-round-
ness of the scientific discipline; but the recoil is
resulting in a technician who is insufficiently
grounded in the principles.

Students of Science have indeed primarily to
do with the kind of investigation whose results
Bacon called lucifera, but our point is that this
is the surest, and sometimes even the shortest
road to that other kind of result which he called
fructifera. In one of his lectures Prof. Karl
Pearson makes the following impressive statement
of his own experience: "I have been engaged for
sixteen years in helping to train engineers, and
those of my old pupils who are now coming to
the front in life are not those who stuck to facts
and formulae, and sought only for what they
thought would be "useful to them in their pro-
fession.' On the contrary, the lads who paid
attention to method, who thought more of proofs
than of formulae, who accepted even the special-
ized branches of their training as a means of
developing habits of observation rather than of
collecting 'useful facts,' these lads have developed
into men who are succeeding in life. And the
reason of this seems to me, when considering
their individual cases, to be that they could adapt

238 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

themselves to an environment more or less differ-
ent from that of the existing profession; they
could go beyond its processes, its formulae, and
its facts, and develop new ones. Their knowl-
edge of method and their powers of observation
enabled them to supply new needs, to answer to
the call when there was a demand, not for old
knowledge, but for trained brains." . . . "The
only sort of technical education the nation ought
to trouble about is teaching people to see and
think." . . . "What we want are trained brains,
scouts in all fields, and not a knowledge of facts
and processes crammed into a wider range of
untrained minds." It comes to this: that, on
the whole, the deeper and more difficult studies,
which stretch our brains most, are of much more
value, even technically, than what are called
"useful facts."

In an interesting address on "The Debt of
the World to Pure Science," Prof. J. J. Stephen-
son points out that the fundamental importance
of abstruse research receives too little consider-
ation in our time, except, of course, from those
who really know. The practical side of life is
all-absorbent; and it is forgotten that "the foun-
dation of industrial advance was laid by workers
in pure science, for the most part ignorant of
utility and caring little about it." . . . "The
investigator takes the first step and makes the

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 239

inventor possible. Thereafter, the inventor's
work aids the investigator in making new dis-
coveries to be utilized in their turn."

It is quite plain from the history of Science
that the practical value of Science is in direct
proportion to the precision of scientific methods,
and that the most "theoretical" investigations
have often had practical results of extraordinary
magnitude. It is not merely that the theory
forms the foundations of the Science, there is
another reason. Scientific descriptions increase
in value as they become absolutely impersonal,
as they become perfectly precise, and especially
as they become condensed general formulae which
will be applicable to an infinite variety of par-
ticular situations. There is no doubt that the
quiet thinkers in the scientific cloisters are, like
the poets, the makers and shakers of the world.

HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS. — Only the ex-
tremely ignorant can question the utility of,
let us say, the prolonged application of Greek
intellect to the laws of conic sections. Whether
we think of bridges or of projectiles, of the curves
of ships or of the rules of navigation, we must
think"? of conic sections. The rules of navigation,
for instance, are in part based on astronomy.
Kepler's Laws are foundation-stones of that
science, but Kepler discovered that Mars moves
in an ellipse round the sun in one of the foci by

240 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

a deduction from conic sections. As Laplace
said, "Without the speculations of the Greeks on
the curves formed from the section of a cone by
a plane, these beautiful laws might have been
still unknown." Yet the historical fact is that
these conic sections were studied as an abstract
science for eighteen centuries before they came to
be of their highest use.

Those who doubt the value of "theoretical
researches" should study Pasteur's life and ob-
serve how his services to mankind were based on
inquiries which seemed at first sight remote from
human application. It is true that Pasteur may
be interpreted as the master-peasant, and the
tanner's son (see Evolution, p. 224), but this
need not keep us from recognizing that his re-
searches form an intellectual chain, the first link
of which was a study of the crystalline forms of
tartrates. Thus, justly, the list of his achieve-
ments, recorded around his tomb, begins with
"Molecular dissymmetry, 1848," an almost dia-
grammatically theoretical beginning for a series
of researches which have had such a deep and
extensive influence on the life of Man.

The twitching of the legs of Galvani's frogs
was studied as a theoretical curiosity; who
could have foretold that it pointed to telegraphy?
It was not for practical purposes that William
Smith plodded afoot over England, neither rest-

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 241

ing nor hurrying in his exploration of the strata,
but how much of the exploitation of our country's
mineral resources had its origin in his maps?
The important method of spectrum analysis had
its beginning in some apparently insignificant
observations. Who can say that the early steps
which led to finding a cave of treasures (not alto-
gether without alloy) in coal-tar had, to begin
with, any practical outlook?

From an address on Technical Chemistry, by
Prof. C. E. Munroe, we take another striking
case. "The experience of the past has repeatedly
demonstrated the commercial possibilities that
are latent in scientific theories. A famous exam-
ple is found in the commercial development of
benzene. Lachman, in 1898, after referring to
its discovery by Faraday in 1825, and its pro-
duction from benzoic acid by Mitscherlich nine
years later, says: ' These famous chemists little
thought that their limpid oil would one day lay
claim to be the most important substance in
organic chemistry; that it would give birth to
untold thousands of compounds; that it would
revolutionize science and technology. The tech-
nical development of benzene and its derivatives
employs over fifteen thousand workmen in Ger-
many alone; the commercial value of the prod-
ucts reaches tens of millions of dollars. . . .
Nearly all of this tremendous activity is due to a

242 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

single idea, advanced in a masterly treatise by
Auguste Kelcule in the year 1865."

It is a commonplace that the developments of
steam-power, electric Telegraphy, Telephony, and
Dynamo-electrical machinery, which have changed
human life so markedly, have come about in
association with new theoretical developments in
the sciences of heat and electricity. To substan-
tiate this precisely is not difficult, but an analo-
gous case will, we think, suffice for demonstration.
When Prof. William Thomson published, in 1853,
in the Philosophical Magazine, a stiff bit of
mathematical analysis, which laid the founda-
tion of the theory of electric oscillations, there
can have been few who saw in it the basis of
wireless telegraphy.

In this connection, it is very interesting to
hear Lord Kelvin's own opinion, for he excelled
alike in theoretical insight and in practical appli-
cation. After speaking of "the vast resources
which we derive from direct applications of mod-
ern science," "of the immense practical impor-
tance of the principles of Natural Philosophy,"
he says: "We must not, however, by considera-
tions of this kind, be led to regard applications
to the ordinary purposes of life as the proper
object and end of science. Nothing could more
effectually stop the advancement of knowledge
than the prevalence of such views; even the

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 243

desired practically useful discoveries would not
be made if researches obnoxious to the fatal ques-
tion cui bono were to be uniformly avoided. . . .
Oersted would never have made his great dis-
covery of the action of galvanic currents on mag-
nets had he stopped in his researches to consider
in what manner they could possibly be turned to
practical account; and so we should not now
be able to boast of the wonders done by the elec-
tric telegraph. Indeed, no great law in Natural
Philosophy has ever been discovered for its
practical applications, but the instances are in-
numerable of investigations apparently quite
useless, in this narrow sense of the word, which
have led to the most valuable results."

Dr. A. E. Shipley has recently called attention
to two diagrammatic illustrations of our theme.
"A few years ago no knowledge could seem more
useless to the practical man, no search more
futile than that which sought to distinguish be-
tween one species of gnat or tick and another;
yet that knowledge has rendered it possible to
open up Africa and to cut the Panama Canal.
This witness," Mr. F. A. Dixey remarks, "is
true; and it would be difficult to point to a more
complete demonstration of the fact that natural
knowledge, pursued for its own sake, without
any direct view to future utility, will often lead
to results of the most unexpected kind and of

244 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the very highest practical importance" (Nature,
Sept. 2, 1909).

We see, then, that undue insistence on the
practical utility of science is not historically
justified, and that hasty criticism of lines of
scientific work as purely theoretical is likely to
be very unjust. What practical result may flow
from an apparently abstruse and detached inves-
tigation no one is wise enough to predict, and
inventions usually rest on a patiently established
theoretical basis. Minerva-like birth of dis-
coveries is rare. As Prof. Stephenson puts it:
"Discoveries which prove all-important in secon-
dary results do not burst forth full grown; they
are, so to say, the crown of a structure raised
painfully and noiselessly by men indifferent to
this world's affairs, caring little for fame and
even less for wealth. Facts are gathered, prin-
ciples are discovered, each falling into its own
place until at last the brilliant crown shines out,
and the world thinks it sees a miracle."

The ultra-practical man's impatient "What's
the use of it?" may be occasionally a sound
corrective, since science, as well as art, requires
to be socialized. But it often reveals an intel-
lectual shortsightedness. As Sir Lyon Playfair
once said: "Truer relations of science to industry
are implied in Greek mythology. Vulcan, the
god of industry, wooed science, in the form of

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 245

Minerva, with a passionate love, but the chaste
goddess never married. Yet she conferred upon
mankind nearly as many arts as Prometheus."

SOCIALIZED SCIENCE. — But how does the idea
of science for its own sake harmonize with that
expressed in Spencer's sentence: "Science is for
Life, not Life for Science " ? There is no antithesis.

1. Science is certainly for the development of
life, but "life" must not be conceived of nar-
rowly. "Is not the life more than meat, and the
body than raiment?"

2. Moreover, for educated men in modern
civilized communities, life must be to some
extent for science, if it is to have any degree of
completeness.

3. Our point has been that Science will do
best for the citizen if it is left to attend to its own
business.

On the other hand, while we may not be able
to say of any specialized line of scientific inquiry
that it is not of value to human life, there are some
which are more promising and urgent than others.
Many kinds of quantitative descriptive work,
which afford very enjoyable occupation to natu-
ralists and very useful disciplining material for
apprentices, are not particularly urgent. And
eventually we must admit that men of science
are the intellectual advisers and educators of the
great mass of humanity who are concerned with

246 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

the fundamental problem of bread and butter,
with the science known as "Brodwissenschaft."

Therefore, since scientific investigators are as
liable to preoccupation as other men, it is well
that prominence should be given to the humane
ideal of socialized science. Bacon got at it long
ago in the description which he gives of the true
spirit of the scientific investigator in a famous
passage in the Advancement of Learning: "This
is that which will indeed dignify and exalt knowl-
edge if contemplation and action be more nearly
and straitly conjoined and united together than
they have been; for men have entered into a
desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon
a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; some-
times to entertain their minds with variety and
delight; sometimes for ornament and reputa-
tion; and sometimes to enable them to victory
of wit and contradiction; and most times for
lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to
give a true account of their gift of reason to the
benefit of man; as if there were sought in knowl-
edge a couch whereupon to repose a searching and
restless spirit; or a tarasse for a wandering and
variable mind to walk up and down with a fair
prospect; or a tower of state for a proud mind
to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding
ground for strife and contention; or a shop for
profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse for

THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 247

the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's
estate."

But there are two sides to this idea of social-
ization, the other being the duty of the State to
utilize the resources of Science in the solution
of practical problems. Whether we think of the
more effective and less wasteful exploitation of
the Earth, or of the gathering in of the harvest
of the sea, or of making occupations more whole-
some, or of beautifying human surroundings, or of
exterminating infectious diseases, or of improving
the physique of the race — we are filled with amaze-
ment at the abundance of expert knowledge of
priceless value which is not being utilized.

As to what may be called the moralization of
Science — this is a subject on which only the high
priests in the temple should speak, and we shall
not do more than recall the noble words of one
of these. Helmholtz writes: "As the highest
motive influencing my work — though not readied
in my early years — was the thought of the civil-
ized world as a constantly developing and living
whole, whose life, in comparison with that of the
individual, appears as eternal. In the service of
this eternal humanity my contribution to knowl-
edge, small as it was, appeared in the light of a
holy service, and the worker himself feels bound
by affection to the whole human race, and his
work is thereby sanctified. This feeling all can

248 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

theoretically understand, but long experience of
it alone can develop it into a powerful and steady
impulse."

In this chapter we have used the word utility
in the sense of practical utility, having in other
chapters said enough to show that Science can
justify itself, if necessary, at a higher court of
appeal. For Science is a natural and necessary
development and discipline of Man; it supplies
stimulus and raw material to literature and art;
and it has contributed to the store of great ideas
which should always be in the saddle and should
always rule mankind.

SUMMARY. — Science is justified for its own sake
as a natural and necessary human activity. It has
grown out of practical lore and always receives
fresh stimulus by coming back to practical problems.
One of the great conditions of human progress is
the unceasing reciprocal relationship between science
and occupation. The practical utility of the sciences
is so great that there is danger in exaggerating utili-
tarian criteria. Nothing is more certain than the
fundamental value of "theoretical science." But
while the greatest practical gains have come from
the prosecution of "pure science," it may be agreed
that Science should be socialized, for, after all, Sci-
ence is for Life, not Life for Science. As Comte
said, "Knowledge is Foresight, and Foresight is
Power."

REFERENCES TO BOOKS

REFERENCES TO BOOKS

N.B. — The student cannot do better than begin by reeding the
various Introductions to the Sciences which this Library affords.

BACON, FRANCIS. — Novum Organum (1620).
BAIN, ALEXANDER. — Logic (1870).

BBRGSON, HENRI. — Creative Evolution. Translation (1911).
This remarkable work deals in great part with the philos-
ophy of biology.

BOUTROUX, E. — Science et Religion (1909).

So far as we know, the best of the many discussions of the
relations of Science and Religion.

CAIRD, JOHN. — Lectures and Addresses (1899). See Lecture
on The Progress! veness of the Sciences.

CASE, THOMAS. — Scientific Method as a Mental Operation,

in Lectures on the Method of Science (1906).
This valuable work contains a series of lectures by leading
authorities who discuss the methods of the various Sciences.

CLIFFORD, W. K. — The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences.
Aleo his stimulating Lectures and Essays (1879).

DRIESCH, HANS. — Science and Philosophy of the Organism,

2vols. (1908).
A profound contribution to the philosophy of biology.

FLINT, R. — Philosophy as Scientia Scientiarum, and a His-
tory of the Classification of the Sciences (1904).
A very learned account of the numerous attempts to classify
knowledge.

FOSTER, SIR MICHAEL. — Presidential Address at the Meeting
of the British Association at Dover in 1899. Report,
Brit. Association for the Advancement of Science (1899^.
A noteworthy discourse on the characteristics of the scien-
tific mood.

251

852 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

GOTCH, FRANCIS. — On Some Aspects of the Scientific Method,1
in Lectures on the Method of Science (1906).

HILL, ALEXANDEB. — Introduction to Science.
A wise and attractive little introduction.

HOTTSSAY, F. — Nature et Sciences naturelles (1908).

HUXLEY, T. H. — Collected Essays, e. g. Method and Results;
Science and Education.

JEVONS, W. STANLEY. — The Principles of Science, a Treatise
on Logic and Scientific Method. 3rd Ed. (1879).

LANXESTER, SIB E. RAY. — The Kingdom of Man (1906).

A powerful book showing what Science has done and what
it might at present be doing for the commonwealth of Man.

McDouGALL, W. — Psycho-Physical Method, in Lectures on
the Method of Science (1906).

MACH, E. — Die Analyse der Empfindungen (1886). 5th Ed.

1906.
A classic statement of the view that science is description.

MEBZ, J. T. — A History of European Thought in the Nine-
teenth Century. Vol i. Introduction. Scientific Thought
(1896). Vol. ii (1903).
A work of magistral scholarship and deep insight.

MTVART, ST. GEORGE. — The Groundwork of Science (1898).

MOBGAN, C. LLOYD. — The Interpretation of Nature (1905).

A fine introduction to the philosophical questions raised
by Science.

NATORP, P. — Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissen-
schaften (1910).

OSTWALD, W. — Natural Philosophy (1910).

A very important discussion of the principles of chemical
and physical Science.
OTTO, R. — Naturalism and Religion (1907).

A competent and fair-minded statement of the scientific
position, with an explanation of the religious.
PEARSON, KARL. — The Grammar of Science. 2nd Ed.
(1900). New Ed. (1911).

An indispensable and quite unique book.
PICARD, EMILE. — La Science moderne et son 6tat actucl
(1909).

REFERENCES TO BOOKS 253

POINOARE\ H. — La Science et I'Hypoth&se (1909). La Valeur
de la Science (1909).

POYNTINQ, J. J. — Address, Section "A, "-Report of British
Association for 1889. Discussion of "Laws of Nature."

SHERRINGTON, C. S. — Physiology; its Scope and Method,
in Lectures on the Method of Science (1906).

SPENCER, HERBERT. — The Classification of the Sciences
(1864).

STALLO, J. B. — The Concepts and Theories of Modern
Physics.

STRONG, T. B. — Scientific Method as Applied to History?
hi Lectures on the Method of Science (1906).

TAYLOR, A. E. Elements of Metaphysics (1903).

We wish to express our great indebtedness to this book,
which is remarkable among other qualities for its under-
standing of scientific aims and methods.

THOMSON, J. ARTHUR. — The Bible of Nature (1908). The
Progress of Science in the Century (1903) .

TYNDALL, JOHN. — Fragments of Science (1871). 5th Ed.
1876. Including the famous essay on the scientific use
of the imagination.

WARD, JAMES. — Naturalism and Agnosticism. 2 vola

(1899).

A classic work, indispensable to those who would inquire
into the philosophy of Science.

WHITE, A. D. — A History of the Warfare of Science with

Theology.

A remarkable book which has had a great influence. Now
in 16th Ed.

INDEX

JEschylus, 8

/Esthetics, 168-169

-(Etiology, 113

Agassis, 20, 28

Agnosticism, 214

Argon, 65

Aristotle, 36, 68, 60

Art and science, 166

Artistic element in science, 167

Aspects of reality, 160-164

Astronomy, 66, 133, 181, 232

Bacon, 7, 20, 29, 59, 81, 83, 237,

246

Bain, 91
Bateson, 23
Beauty, sense of, 169
Behaviour, evolution of, 154
Benxene, 241

Bergson, 42, 142, 147, 153
Biology, 105; aim of, 53, 109
Bio-physics, 97
Boutroux, 215
Branford, B., 32, 168/230
Brooks, W. K., 22

Case, T., 61, 229

Causes, kinds of, 42

Cavendish, 65

Chemistry, 105

Circulation of the blood, 72;

matter, 175
Clarke, Eagle, 67
Coleridge, 205
Common sense, 38
Comte, 54, 67, 85
Conflict between science and

ligion, 208
Conic sections, 239
Conservation of energy, 182

of

Dalton, 134

Darwin, 30, 58, 176, 180
Deduction, 59
Description, scientific, 39

Development, 146

Driesch, 147

Dryad in the tree, 184

Eel, life-history of, 149

Emerson, 189

Emotional mood, 11

Energy, 62, 128; conservation of,

182; transformation of, 182
Entelechy, 147
Entities, 214
Espinas, 226
Evolution, 55, 127, 128, 142, 163,

Experiment, 69
Explanation, 41

Facts, 40, 63

Fairy tales, 179

Faraday, 26

Fechner, 159

Flint, Robert, 83, 88, 90

Forbes, Edward, 62

Formulation, 73

Foster, Sir Michael, 15, 18

Galileo, 59, 209
Geneology, 113
Geography, 120
Geology, 108
Goethe, 120, 186
Gotch, 42, 73, 76, 183
Gravitation, 134

Haddon, 100

Harvey, 72

Helmholtz, 100, 247

Hinks, 66

Hobbes, 137

Huxley, 21, 22, 23, 24, 37, 51, 83.

141, 158, 198
Hypothesis, 69

Imagination, scientific use of, 75
Induction, 59

255

256

INDEX

James, William, 193, 215
Jordan, D. S., 176

Kant, 57, 161

Kelvin, Lord, 29, 46, 47, 64, 67,

74, 76, 77, 242
Kepler, 239
Koch, 70

Lankester, Sir E. Ray, 205

Laplace, 213, 240

Laws of Nature, 49

Life, abundance of, 185; insur-

gence of, 185
Logic of science, 58
Lotze, 177

Macdougall, 158, 159

Man, primitive, 8

Marshall, H. R., 169

Materialism, 212

Mathematics, history of, 228, 229

Matter, 128, 134; electrical theory

of, 135

Maxwell, Clerk, 20, 61, 77, 78
Mayer, 62
Measurement, 64
Mechanistic theory, 145
Meredith, 171-172
Merz, 51
Metaphysics, 126; service of, to

science, 129
Migration, 67
Mill, J. S., 60
Monge, 221
Morgan, Lloyd, 140

Nature, 195; emotional relation
to, 179; fundamental impres-
sions of, 172, 175; love of,
171; strategy of, 198; voices
of, 206

Nature-poetry, 179

Nature-Psalms, 201

Nebula, primitive, 141, 162

Neo-vitalism, 184

Newton, 61

Observation, 61

Order of Nature, 174

Organism, nature of, 118, 143,

145, 152
Origin of living creatures upon the

earth, 139

Parasites, 71
Pasteur, 71, 240

Pearson, Karl, 25, 35, 50, 73, 84,
92, 237

Ramsay, Sir. William, 65
Rayleigh, Lord, 64
Reduction to simpler terms, 46, 68
Religion, 193; and science, 192-

223; approaches to, 208
Russell, E. S., 149, 151

Sciences, abstract, 104; applied,
114; classification of, 81-123;
correlation of, 117; exact, 107;
synthetic, 108

Science, aim of, 35-56; and feel-
ing, 188; and philosophy, 124-
165; and practical lore, 225;
and religion, 192-223; applied,
232; limitations of, 134, 205;
utility of, 224

Scientific method, 57-80

Scientific mood, 7-34

Seasons, biology of, 180

Selection, natural, 197; social, 197

Shipley, A. E., 243

Siebold, 71

Smith, William, 240

Sociology, 105, 107

Soul and body, 153, 160

Spencer, 86, 217

Stephenson, 243, 244

Struggle for existence, 196

Tait, P. G., 37, 74
Taylor, A. E., 63, 124, 157, 194
Technical education, 237-238
Theoretical science, 236
Thompson, Silvanus P., 29, 47
Tyndall, 62, 75

Uniformity of Nature, 78
Utility of science, 224-248

Vitalistic theory, 145, 147

Wallace, 234

Web of life, 30, 177, 181

Weismann, 27

Weldon, 103

Whitman, 170

Wonder, sense of, 173, 201

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Geology, Glasgow University. 38 maps and figures. Describes
the origin of the earth, the formation and changes of its surface and
structure, its geological history, the first appearance of life, and its
influence upon the globe.

56. MAN: A HISTORY OF THE HUMAN BODY. By A. Keith, M. D.,
Hunterian Professor, Royal College of Surgeons, London. Shows
how the human body developed.

74. NERVES. By David Fraser Harris, M. D., Professor of Physi-
ology, Dalhousie University, Halifax. Explains in non-technical
language the place and powers of the nervous system.

21. AN INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE. By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson,
Science Editor of the Home University Library. For those unac-
quainted with the scientific volumes in the series, this should prove
an excellent introduction.

14. EVOLUTION. By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson and Prof. Patrick
Geddes. Explains to the layman what the title means to the scien-
tific world.

23. ASTRONOMY. By A. R. Hinks, Chief Assistant at the Cambridge
Observatory. "Decidedly original in substance, and the most readable
and informative little book on modern astronomy we have seen for a
long time." — Nature.

24. PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. By Prof . W. F. Barrett, formerly Presi-
dent of the Society for Psychical Research.

9. THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS. By Dr. D. H. Scott, President
of the Linnean Society of London. The story of the development
of flowering plants, from the earliest zoological times, unlocked from
technical language.
111. BIOLOGY. By J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes.

43. MATTER AND ENERGY. By F. Soddy, Lecturer in Physical
Chemistry and Radioactivity, University of Glasgow. "Brilliant.
Can hardly be surpassed. Sure to attract attention." — New York
Sun.

41. PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR. By William Mc-

Dougall, of Oxford. A well digested summary of the essentials of the
science put in excellent literary form by a leading authority.

42. THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY. By Prof. J. G. McKendrick,

A compact statement by the Emeritus Professor at Glasgow, for
uninstructed readers.

37. ANTHROPOLOGY. By R. R. Marett, Reader in Social Anthro-
pology, Oxford. Seeks to plot out and sum up the general series of
changes, bodily and mental, undergone by man in the course of
history. "Excellent. So enthusiastic, so clear and witty, and so
well adapted to the general reader." — American Library Association
Booklist.

17. CRIME AND INSANITY. By Dr. C. Mercier, author of "Crime
and Criminals," etc.

12. THE ANIMAL WORLD. By Prof. F. W. Gamble.

15. INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS. By A. N. Whitehead,

author of "Universal Algebra."

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.

69. A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT. By John B. Bury,
M. A., LL. D., Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge
University. Summarizes the history of the long struggle between
authority and reason and of the emergence of the principle that co-
ercion of opinion is a mistake.

96. A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By Clement C. J. Webb, Oxford.

35. THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY. By Bertrand Russell, Lee-

turer and Late Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.

60. COMPARATIVE RELIGION. By Prof. J. Estlin Carpenter. "One
of the few authorities on this .subject compares all the religions to
see what they have to offer on the great themes of religion." — Chris-
tian Work and Evangelist.

44. BUDDHISM. By Mrs. Rhys Davids, Lecturer on Indian Philoso-
phy, Manchester.

46. ENGLISH SECTS: A HISTORY OF NONCONFORMITY. ByW.B.

Selbie. Principal of Manchester College, Oxford.

55. MISSIONS: THEIR RISE AND DEVELOPMENT. By Mrs. Man-
dell Creighton, author of "History of England." The author seeks to
prove that missions have done more to civilize the world than any
other human agency.

52. ETHICS. By G. E. Moore, Lecturer in Moral Science, Cambridge.
Discusses what is right and what is wrong, and the whys and where-
fores.

65. THE LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. By George F.
Moore. Professor of the History of Religion, Harvard University "A
popular work of the highest order. Will be profitable to anybody
who cares enough about Bible study to read a serious book on the
subject." — American Journal of Theology.

88. RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT BETWEEN OLD AND NEW TESTA-
MENTS. By R. H. Charles, Canon of Westminster. Shows how
religious and ethical thought between 180 P, C. and 100 A. D. grew
naturally into that of the New Testament.

50. THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By B. W. Bacon,

Professor of New Testament Criticism, Yale. An authoritative
summary of the results of modern critical research with regard to
the origins of the New Testament.

SOCIAL SCIENCE.

91. THE NEGRO. By W. E. Burghardt DuBois, author of "Souls of
Black Folks," etc. A history of the black man in Africa, America and
elsewhere.

77. CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT SHARING. By Aneurin Wil-
liams, Chairman, Executive Committee, International Co-opera-
tive Alliance, etc. Explains the various types of co-partnership and
profit-sharing, and gives details of the arrangements^ now in force in
many of the creat industries.

99. POLITICAL THOUGHT: THE UTILITARIANS. FROM BENT-
HAM TO J. S. MILL. By William L. P. Davidson.

103. ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT. From Locke to Bentham. By
Harold J. Laski, Professor of Political Science in the London School of
Economics.

98. POLITICAL THOUGHT: FROM HERBERT SPENCER TO THE
PRESENT DAY. By Ernest Barker, M. A.

79. UNEMPLOYMENT. By A. C. Pigou, M. A., Professor of Political
Economy at Cambridge. The meaning, measurement, distribution,
and effects of unemployment, its relation to wages, trade fluctuations,
and disputes, and some proposals of remedy or relief.

80. COMMON-SENSE IN LAW. By Prof. Pad Vinogradoff, D. C. L.,
LL. D. Social and Legal Rules— Legal Rights and Duties— Facts
and Acts in Law — Legislation — Custom — Judicial Precedents — Equity
— The Law of Nature.

49. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. By S. J. Chapman,

Professor of Political Economy and Dean of Faculty of Commerce
and Administration, University of Manchester.

11. THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH. By J. A. Hobson, author of "Prob-
lems of Poverty." A study of the structure and working of the modern
business world.

1. PARLIAMENT. ITS HISTORY, CONSTITUTION, AND PRAC-
TICE. By Sir Courtenay P. Ilbert, Clerk of the House of Commons.

16. LIBERALISM. By Prof. L. T. Hobhouse, author of "Democracy and
Reaction." A masterly philosophical and historical review of the subject.

5. THE STOCK EXCHANGE. By F. W. Hirst, Editor of the London
Economist. Reveals to the non-financial mind the facts about invest-
ment, speculation, and the other terms which the title suggests.

10. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. By J. Ramsay Macdonald, Chair-
man of the British Labor Party.

28. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY. By D. H. MacGregor, Professor
of Political Economy, University of Leeds. An outline of the recent
changes that have given us the present conditions of the working classes
and the principles involved.

29. ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW. By W. M. Geldart, Vinerian
Professor of English Law, Oxford. A simple statement of the basic
principles of the English legal system on which that of the United
States is based.

32. THE SCHOOL: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF EDU-
CATION. By J. J. Findlay, Professor of Education, Manchester.
Presents the history, the psychological basis, and the theory of the
school with a rare power of summary and suggestion.

6. IRISH NATIONALITY. By Mrs. J. R. Green. A brilliant account
of the genius and mission of the Irish people. "An entrancing work,
and I would advise every one with a drop of Irish blood in his veins
or a vein of Irish sympathy in his heart to read it." — New York Times'
Review.

107. STUDY OF HEREDITY. By Ernest William MacBride.

GENERAL HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY.

102. SERBIA. By L. F. Waring, with preface by J. M. Jovanovitch,

Serbian Minister to Great Britain. The main outlines of Serbian
history, with special emphasis on the immediate causes of the war.
and the questions in the after-the-war settlement.

33. THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By A. F. Pcllard, Professor of
English History, University of London.

95. BELGIUM. By R. C. K. Ensor, Sometime Scholar of Balliol College.
The geographical, linguistic, historical, artistic and literary associa-
tions.

100. POLAND. By J. Alison Phillips, University of Dublin. The history
of Poland with special emphasis upon the Polish qustion of the pre-
sent day.

34. CANADA. By A. G. Bradley.

72. GERMANY OF TO-DAY. By Charles Tower.

78. LATIN AMERICA. By William R. Shepherd, Professor of His-
tory, Columbia. With maps. The historical, artistic, and commercial
development of the Central South American republics.

18. THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA. By Sir H. H. Johnston.

19. THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA. By H. A. Giles, Professor of
Chinese, Cambridge.

36. PEOPLES AND PROBLEMS OF INDIA. By Sir T. W. Holderness,
"The best small treatise dealing with the range of subjects fairly in-
dicated by the title."— The Dial.

26. THE DAWN OF HISTORY. By J. L. Myers, Professor of Ancient
History, Oxford.

92. THE ANCIENT EAST. By D. G. Hogarth, M. A., F. B. A., F. S. A.,
Connects with Prof. Myers's "Dawn of History" (No. 26) at about
1000 B. C. and reviews the history of Assyria, Babylon, Cilicia, Persia
and Macedon.

30. ROME. By W. Warde Fowler, author of "Social Life at Rome," etc.

13. MEDIEVAL EUROPE. By H. W. C. Davis, Fellow at Balliol Col-
lege, Oxford, author of "Charlemagne," etc.
3. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Hilaire Belloc.

57. NAPOLEON, By H. A. L. Fisher, Vice-chancellor of Sheffield Uni-
versity. Author of "The Republican Tradition in Europe."

20. HISTORY OF OUR TIME. (1885-1911). By C. P. Gooch.

22. THE PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES. By Rev. William Barry,
D. D., author of "The Papal Monarchy," etc. The story of the rise and
fall of the Temporal Power.

108. WALES. By W. Watkin Davies, M.A., F.R. Hist.S., Barrister-at-
Law, author of "How to Read History," etc.

110. EGYPT, By E. A. Wallis Budge.

104. OUR FORERUNNERS. By M. C. Burkitt, M.A., F.S.A. A com-
prehensive study of the beginnings of mankind and the culture of the
prehistoric era.

4. A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE. By G. H. Perns,
author of "Russia in Revolution," etc.

94. THE NAVY AND SEA POWER. By Dayid Hannay, author of "Short
History of the Royal Navy," etc. A brief history of the navies, sea
Power, and ship growth of all nations, including the rise and decline
of America on the sea, and explaining the present British supremacy.

8. POLAR EXPLORATION. By Dr. W. S. Bruce, Leader of the
"Scotia" expedition. Emphasizes the results of the expeditions.

51. MASTER MARINERS. By John R. Spears, author of "The His-
tory of Our Navy," etc. A history of sea craft adventure from the
earliest times.

86. EXPLORATION OF THE ALPS. By Arnold Lunn, M. A.
7. MpDERN GEOGRAPHY. By Dr. Marion Newbigm. Shows the re-
lation of physical features to living things and to some of the chief in-
stitutions of civilization.

76. THE OCEAN. A GENERAL ACCOUNT OF THE SCIENCE OF
THE SEA. By Sir John Murray/K. C. B., Naturalist H. M. S. "Chal-
lenger," 1872-1876, joint author of "The Depths of the Ocean," etc.

84. THE GROWTH OF EUROPE. By Granville Cole, Professor of
Geology, Royal College of Science, Ireland. A study of the geology
and physical geography in connection with the political geography.

105. COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY. By Marion I. Newbigin. Funda-
mental conceptions of commodities, transport and market.

AMERICAN HISTORY.

47. THE COLONIAL PERIpD (1607-1766). By Charles McLean An-
drews, Professor of American History, Yale.

82. THE WARS BETWEEN ENGLAND AND AMERICA (1763-1815).
By Theodore C. Smith, Professor of American History, Williams
College. A history of the period, with especial emphasis on The Re-
volution and The War of 1812.

67. FROM JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN (1815-1860). By William Mac-
Donald. Professor of History, Brown University. The author makes
the history of this period circulate about constitutional ideas and slavery
sentiment.

25. THE CIVIL WAR (1854-1865). By Frederick L. Paxson, Professor
of American History, University of Wisconsin.

39. RECONSTRUCTION AND UNION (1865-1912). By Paul Leland
Haworth. A History of the United States in our own times.

Published by
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Introduction to science

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