Man's Place in Nature 233 



(c) In the third place, while science aims at 

 redescribing in the simplest available terms what 

 has taken place in the past and goes on taking 

 place now, it does not pretend to explain anything. 1 

 It shows painstakingly that a certain collocation 

 of antecedents will result in a certain collocation of 

 consequents; it can often analyze the sequence 

 of events into a series of simple movements; but 

 except in this sense of reducing to a common 

 denominator, it does not explain anything. Under 

 certain conditions hydrogen and oxygen combine 

 to form water, and some analysis of the probable 

 succession of events is possible, but in the long run 

 the chemist does not tell us how it is that the two 

 gases form water. Not to be too pedantic, there 

 is a sense in which the physicist can explain the 

 path of a projectile or the course of a comet, but 

 it is always in terms, such as gravitation, which are 

 not self-explanatory. In most cases, moreover, he 

 works with symbols, such as molecules, atoms, and 

 corpuscles, which are representative of the un- 

 known real things, so representative of them that 



1 " It is very desirable," Huxley said, "to remember that 

 evolution is not an explanation of the cosmos, but merely 

 a generalized statement of the method and results of that 

 process. And, further, that, if there is any proof that the 

 cosmic process was set agoing by any agent, then that 

 agent will be the creator of it and of all its products, al- 

 though supernatural intervention may remain strictly 

 excluded from its further course." 



