THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE 403 



presumption that what is assumed because it is convenient 

 cannot be really true. But it should be remembered also that 

 even as the atom was proved to exist only by being exploded 

 and became good science only by becoming a logical contradiction 

 and ceasing to be as indivisible as an "atom" is verbally bound 

 to be, so the ether may be promoted out of the methodological 

 status it bears at present only by being so transformed in the 

 advance of physics that its best friends, like Sir Oliver Lodge, will 

 hesitate to recognise it. 



I will refrain also from contesting minor points, e.g. from 

 cavilling at the variety of his definitions of Time, which declare 

 in one passage that time is " essentially unchangeable," even 

 for mathematicians, and in another that it is an " abstraction " 

 of the element of" progressiveness," and so presumably of our 

 own construction, together with its " uniformity," which is 

 postulated, but assuredly could not be established experimen- 

 tally. I will pass rather to those points of Sir Oliver Lodge's 

 which are likely to be unpopular with scientists, and show 

 that they contain nothing that is contrary to the true spirit and 

 methods of science. 



To discuss first the legitimacy of " Vitalism." We are here 

 confronted with a dispute which has grown intricate because it 

 was not observed that no conceptions which are capable of 

 being scientifically tested are either scientific or unscientific 

 perse. It is not scientific to believe in matter, anymore than 

 in spirit, as an unreasoning act of faith, nor unscientific to 

 believe in devils, any more than in ether, as a definite hypothesis 

 from which verifiable consequences are deducible. What is 

 unscientific is to believe in devils without good and sufficient 

 evidence, and to disbelieve in them merely because they are 

 such an uncomfortable hypothesis. Even the conception of 

 " law " may be conceived in a thoroughly anti-scientific way 

 and used as a method of burking scientific inquiry. E.g. socio- 

 logists are prone, so soon as they have detected any uniformity 

 in human affairs, to dub it a "law," and to think that this ends 

 the matter, instead of investigating what combinations of forces, 

 often very various, have produced the apparently uniform result, 

 such as e.g. the fall of the birth-rate in all civilised societies. 

 Or again, it is very common to hear the law of evolution talked 

 about as if it were an adequate explanation and assured 

 guarantee of the changes which we value as " progress." In 



