44 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



biology and psychology. Whether the acceptance was wise, and whether 

 economy of thought may not be paid for too dearly, are questions beside 

 our immediate point. What we have to note is this : that to systematize 

 the facts of science, by any principle immanent or external, is to bring 

 logic to bear upon them, to arrange them in the light of those logical 

 laws which the experience of the race has tested and found secure, and 

 which therefore form the stock-in-trade of a beginning theory of knowl- 

 edge. We proceed, says Bacon, "by observing or by meditating on 

 facts"; "to the formation of a science," writes Whewell, "two things 

 are requisite, — Facts and Ideas ; observation of Things without, and an 

 inward effort of Thought"; and Huxley demands for a science "scien- 

 tific observation" and "scientific reasoning." Science, that is to say, 

 in the meaning of a scientific system, is the outcome of scientific activity 

 ordered by logic. 



It is only, be it remarked, when we thus consider science as a system, 

 that we can at all subscribe to Huxley's definition of science as " organ- 

 ized" or "perfected common sense." Scientific activity is almost the 

 antipodes of common sense. For science is disinterested, and common 

 sense is self-centered; science is observational, while "there is not one 

 person in a hundred who can describe the commonest occurrence with 

 even an approach to accuracy " ; and science is analytical, while common 

 sense, as Huxley shows by reference to " the natural object Water," is 

 content with gross appearance and total function. Common sense is 

 the average man's intellectual modus vivendi; and the one practicable 

 bridge that connects it with science is the bridge of logic; the average 

 man is, in his own way, a very Aristotle. Were that bridge to fall, the 

 definition would be impossible; we should have merely the occasional 

 instances in which the points of view of science and of common sense 

 coincide, — limiting cases, too few to provide even stepping-stones from 

 the one to the other. 



Science, therefore, may mean two things, scientific activity and the 

 scientific system; and this twofold meaning is a fertile source of con- 

 fusion. There is always the danger, for instance, that logic, which is 

 a good servant, become the master, — as it does when Pearson tells us 

 that the goal of science is "nothing short of a complete interpretation 

 of the universe." Science, as scientific activity, aims at no goal; even 

 the phrase " pursuit of truth," useful and inevitable as it may be, may 

 also be misleading; science is, in strictness, only self-directed upon an 

 endless task. So the result of scientific activity is not an interpreta- 

 tion, in any pregnant sense of that term, but only a transcription of the 

 world of human experience as it appears from a certain point of view. 

 Science, in Pearson's formula, thus stands for the system of science; 

 and the system in turn is made to stand, not only for the outcome of 

 scientific activity as worked over by an accepted theory of knowledge, 



