BEEPER HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 71 



superstitious aud cliildisli when the general estimate of liumau wisdom 

 so decidedly sinks. 



But the more important change is in the extension of the Baconian 

 method to the whole domain of philosophy. While one part of the 

 " wisdom of the world " has been discredited as resting solely on 

 authority, another large division of it is now rejected as resting on 

 inductions insufficient or untrustworthy, and another as resting on 

 groundless assumptions, disguised under the name of necessary truths, 

 truths of the reason, truths given in consciousness, etc. The long 

 habit of trying experiments, the vast experience which has been 

 gained of the mistakes which may be made about matters of fact 

 and of the infinite carelessness of the unscientific mind, have exposed 

 to doubt whatever has been deduced in past ages from facts not 

 recurrent or capable of being reproduced at will. The steady prog- 

 ress of discovery in the experimental sciences has stood out in 

 contrast with the oscillating and unprogressive character of the 

 sciences of mind. Moreover, in their process of extension the ex- 

 perimental sciences have constantly trenched on the domain which 

 was supposed to lie definitively beyond their limit. Physiology has 

 brought us close to mind, and the old distinction between matter and 

 spirit begins to be slighted as a superstition. The old psychology 

 also is assailed as not properly based on physiology. Moral phi- 

 losophy does not escape. It, as well as the philosophy of law, has 

 suffered through the influx of new knowledge about remote races 

 of men. Duties and rights, which once appeared axiomatic, and 

 inseparable from human nature, now appear the artificial products 

 of special conditions. The very notion of duty itself is represented 

 as such an artificial product. 



All these new ideas gathering upon our minds produce a skepticism 

 with regard to current philosophy which extends much further than 

 the particular beliefs with which they seem to conflict. We have 

 grown so accustomed to find so-called incontrovertible axioms resolve 

 themselves into inveterate prejudices, that we have grown shy of all 

 those facile generalities which captivated former ages. Those current 

 abstractions wliich make up all the morality and all the philosophy of 

 most people, have become suspicious and dangerous to us. Mind and 

 matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, honor and inter- 

 est, virtue and vice, all these words, which seemed once to express 

 elementary and certain realities, now strike us as just the words 

 which, thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve at once. 

 It is thus not merely philosophy which is discredited, but just that 

 homely and popular wisdom by which common life is guided. This, 

 too, it appears, instead of being the sterling product of plain expe- 

 rience, is the overflow of a spurious philosophy, the redundance of 

 the uncontrolled speculations of thinkers who were unacquainted with 

 scientific method. 



