SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



having arranged about the special features of the lectures, 

 he continues : " I wish the lecturers to treat their subject 

 as a strictly natural science, the greatest of all possible 

 sciences, indeed, in one sense, the only science, that of 

 Infinite Being. ... I wish it considered just as astronomy 

 or chemistry is." 



Of course, it is not possible to understand these words 

 of Lord Gifford's will in a quite literal sense. If, provision- 

 ally, we call " natural theology " the ultimate conclusions 

 which may be drawn from a study of nature in connection 

 with all other results of human sciences, there cannot be 

 any doubt that these conclusions will be of a rather different 

 character from the results obtained in, say, the special field 

 of scientific chemistry. But, nevertheless, there are, I 

 think, two points of contact between the wider and the 

 narrower field of knowledge, and both of them relate to 

 method. Lord Gifford's own phrase, " Infinite Being," 

 shows us one of these meeting -points. In opposition to 

 history of any form, natural sciences aim at discovering 

 such truths as are independent of special time and of 

 special space, such truths as are " ideas ' in the sense of 

 Plato ; and such eternal results, indeed, always stand in 

 close relation to the ultimate results of human knowledge 

 in general. But besides that there is still another feature 

 which may be common both to " natural theology " and to 

 the special natural sciences, and which is most fully developed 

 in the latter : freedom from prepossessions. This, at least, 

 is an ideal of all natural sciences ; I may say it is the 

 ideal of them. That it was this feature which Lord Clifford 

 had in view in his comparison becomes clear when we read 

 in his will that the lectures on natural theology are 



