20 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



people, particularly as regards matters on which they have 

 strong convictions not based on evidence. In all who 

 seek passionately for the fugitive and difficult goods, 

 the conviction is almost irresistible that there is in the 

 world something deeper, more significant, than the multi- 

 plicity of little facts chronicled and classified by science. 

 Behind the veil of these mundane things, they feel, 

 something quite different obscurely shimmers, shining 

 forth clearly in the great moments of illumination, which 

 alone give anything worthy to be called real knowledge 

 of truth. To seek such moments, therefore, is to them 

 the way of wisdom, rather than, like the man of science, 

 to observe coolly, to analyse without emotion, and to 

 accept without question the equal reality of the trivial 

 and the important. 



Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know 

 nothing. I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare 

 that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight. 

 What I do wish to maintain and it is here that the 

 scientific attitude becomes imperative is that insight, 

 untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of 

 truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important 

 truth is first suggested by its means. It is common 

 to speak of an opposition between instinct and reason ; 

 in the eighteenth century, the opposition was drawn in 

 favour of reason, but under the influence of Rousseau 

 and the romantic movement instinct was given the 

 preference, first by those who rebelled against artificial 

 forms of government and thought, and then, as the purely 

 rationalistic defence of traditional theology became in- 

 creasingly difficult, by all who felt in science a menace 

 to creeds which they associated with a spiritual outlook 

 on life and the world. Bergson, under the name of 

 " intuition," has raised instinct to the position of sole 



