INTRODUCTORY 13 



of science will be completed. What is this but saying that 

 the task of science can never end till man ceases to be, till 

 history is no longer made, and development itself ceases ? 

 It might be supposed that science has made such 

 strides in the last two centuries, and notably in the last 

 fifty years, that we might look forward to a day when its 

 work would be practically accomplished. At the begin- 

 ning of this century it was possible for an Alexander von 

 Humboldt to take a survey of the entire domain of then 

 extant science. Such a survey would be impossible for 

 any scientist now, even if gifted with more than Hum- 

 boldt's powers. Scarcely any specialist of to-day is really 

 master of all the work which has been done in his own 

 comparatively small field. Facts and their classification 

 have been accumulating at such a rate, that nobody seems 

 to have leisure to recognise the relations of sub-groups to 

 the whole. It is as if individual workers in both Europe 

 and America were bringing their stones to one great 

 building and piling them on and cementing them together 

 without regard to any general plan or to their individual 

 neighbour's work ; only where some one has placed a 

 great corner-stone, is it regarded, and the building then 

 rises on this firmer foundation more rapidly than at other 

 points, till it reaches a height at which it is stopped for 

 want of side support. Yet this great structure, the pro- 

 portions of which are beyond the ken of any individual 

 man, possesses a symmetry and unity of its own, not- 

 withstanding its haphazard mode of construction. This 

 symmetry and unity lie in scientific method. The smallest 

 group of facts, if properly classified and logically dealt 

 with, will form a stone which has its proper place in the 

 great building of knowledge, wholly independent of the 

 individual workman who has shaped it. Even when two 

 men work unwittingly at the same stone they will but 

 modify and correct each other's angles. In the face of 

 all this enormous progress of modern science, when in all 

 civilised lands men are applying the scientific method to 

 natural, historical, and mental facts, we have yet to admit 

 that the goal of science is and must be infinitely distant. 



