2 78 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



on materialistic physical science, has been undeniably hostile to the 

 nobler element of man's nature. 



And so it happens that the inevitable reaction is appearing in such 

 phenomena as that which in the political realm of our country is called 

 the progressive spirit, strongly tinctured with religious zeal, and perhaps 

 still more significantly in such mystical manifestations as Christian 

 Science and Theosophy, and the far more soberly wrought out philo- 

 sophical systems of Bergson and Eucken. 



What now, we must inquire, is the fundamental difference between 

 what I am calling the natural history mode of viewing nature and the 

 materialistic mode; and wherein may the former be claimed to be more 

 in accordance with the needs of what is best in man's nature? 



The whole problem rests inevitably on the essential processes and 

 composition of our knowledge of the world and can not be touched with 

 the least prospect of success without due attention to what we call the 

 attributes of natural bodies. 



That these attributes are the common and ultimate ground of both 

 the world itself and of our knowledge of it, is not only demonstrably 

 true, but is truth of such kind that it needs no laborious demonstration 

 except for minds that have become sophisticated by overstraining in 

 trying to answer ill-considered questions. Common sense never strives 

 after a single ultimate, invisible substance, either physical or meta- 

 ' physical, in the orange behind the roundness, yellowness, heaviness, 

 semi-softness, sweetness, juciness, and so on of it. Nor does science 

 ever really demonstrate any such thing, however laboriously it may 

 search for it. What it does accomplish is the resolution or analysis of 

 the orange into innumerable constituent bodies, cells, nuclei, chromo- 

 somes and chemical compounds, solid, liquid and gaseous, chemical 

 -simples, electrons, et cetera. But — and here is a point of prime impor- 

 tance — each and every one of these bodies or objects has its own peculiar 

 attributes exactly as the original orange had. 



Scientific analysis of the objects of nature always runs in a two-fold 

 stream: There are the analyses of the objects into constituent objects, 

 and of stages into precedent stages; and there are the parallel analyses of 

 these constituent objects into their attributes. Each and every object 

 and grade of objects has its own attributes. These latter and these alone 

 secure for the objects places in our knowledge. Now it so happens that 

 all objects in the world as common experience finds them have many 

 attributes never entirely attainable, so far as we can make out, or recog- 

 nizable by any single one of our senses. We have an enormous amount 

 of evidence to the effect that all objects of nature whatever possess 

 attributes fitted to our senses of touch and sight at least. We have no 

 well-established experience of any natural object having but a single 

 attribute, or even a group of attributes appropriate to but a single sense. 



