BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE xiii 



and growth responsive to a central principle of order; or 

 why the human instinct for truth, why science at all? It 

 was typical of Jenkinson that he never strayed from this 

 path of philosophy, once his feet were firmly planted on it. 

 With him thought and character were so much at one that 

 he had no need to cast about for a leading. Singly-deter- 

 mined as he was in himself towards a life of duty, he saw his 

 world as a counterpart in which every natural process tended 

 towards the ultimate fulfilment of a purpose. 



A paper of his exists which well deserves publication if 

 only because it is so much more than a clever arrangement of 

 words, being the expression of a faith by which a man has 

 lived, and died, nobly. It may draw much of its inspiration 

 from Aristotle and Hegel ; but is nevertheless original in the 

 fullest sense as proceeding from one who thought for himself 

 who owned whatever he affirmed. The paper in question first 

 examines the postulates to which the inductive sciences owe 

 their power of advance. In biology no less than in physics 

 strict causation must be assumed. Jenkinson, indeed, is at 

 the level of science so thoroughgoing a determinist that he 

 deprecates the attempt to resort in a biological context to 

 teleological explanations of any kind. Material and efficient 

 causes are the only necessary conditions which science as such 

 has any need to recognize. On the other hand, materialism 

 cannot suffice as a philosophy. ' There is one fact which the 

 materialist forgets to analyse, and which materialism abso- 

 lutely fails to explain, which is indeed the hardest to under- 

 stand of all, and that is knowledge ; and, with knowledge, 

 those other facts of self-consciousness, feeling, and will.' 

 He concludes, with the idealist, that ' the phenomena which 

 constitute the object of knowledge ' in a word, nature and 

 its laws ' are the creation of the mind itself '. He goes on to 

 urge that ' this mind must be regarded not so much as some- 

 thing outside individual minds, differing from them in capacity, 

 but related to them as they are to each other ; but rather as 



