MIV ART'S GROUNDWORK OF SCIENCE. 451 



tells them all this is mere vulgar ignorance, since the groundwork of 

 science is, and must be, something known, rather than a humble 

 wish to know. 



According to Mivart, the groundwork of science consists of truths 

 which can not be obtained by reasoning, and can not depend for 

 their certainty on any experiments or observations alone, since what- 

 ever truths depend upon reasoning can not be ultimate, but must be 

 posterior to, and depend upon, the principles, observations, or ex- 

 periments which show that it is indeed true, and upon which its ac- 

 ceptance thus depends. The groundwork of science must therefore 

 be composed, he says, of truths which are self-evident ; and he assures 

 us that, if this were not the case, natural knowledge would be mere 

 " mental paralysis and self-stultification." 



lie would tell the wayfarer who, having been lost among the 

 mountains, comes at last upon a broad highway winding around the 

 foothills and stretching down over the plain to the horizon, that an 

 attempt to go anywhere upon this road is "mere paralysis," unless he 

 knows where it begins and where it ends. He would have told the 

 ancient dwellers upon the shores of the Nile that their belief that 

 they owed to the river their agriculture, their commerce, their art 

 and science, and all their civilization, was mere self-stultification, 

 because thev knew nothing of its sources in the central table-land. 



May not one believe, with Mivart, that the scientific knowledge 

 which arises in the mind by means of the senses through contact with 

 the world of Nature, thus arises by virtue of our innate reason, and 

 yet find good ground for asking whether physical science may not 

 have something useful and important to tell us about the mechan- 

 ism and history of this innate reason itself;! Is proof that our reason 

 is innate, or born with us, proof that it is ultimate or necessary or 

 beyond the reach of improvement and development by the applica- 

 tion of natural knowledge? May not this reason itself prove, perhaps, 

 to be a mechanical phenomenon of matter and motion, and a part of 

 the discoverable order of physical causation; and may not science 

 some time tell us how it became innate, and what it is worth? 



Questions of this sort are easy to ask but hard to answer; for 

 many hold our only way to reach an answer to be to find out by sci- 

 entific research and discovery. While this method may be too slow 

 for a priori philosophers, may it not be wise for those who, being 

 no philosophers, know of no short cut to natural knowledge, to admit 

 that, while they would like to know more, they have not yet learned 

 all there is to learn? If this suspension of judgment is indeed self- 

 stultification, the case of many students is hard, though they may not 

 really find themselves so helpless as they are told that they must be; 

 tor he who is told by the learned faculty that he is paralyzed need 



