24 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



that science can express a definite judgment on their 

 relationship. Let us suppose that the Emperor Karl V. 

 had said to the learned of his day : " I want a method by 

 which I can send a message in a few seconds to that new 

 world, which my mariners take weeks in reaching. Put 

 your heads together and solve the problem." Would they 

 not undoubtedly have replied that the problem was 

 impossible ? To propose it would have seemed as ridicu- 

 lous to them as the suggestion that science should 

 straightway solve many problems of life and mind seems 

 to the learned of to-day. It required centuries spent in 

 the discovery and classification of new facts before the 

 Atlantic cable became a possibility. It may require the 

 like or even a longer time to unriddle those psychical and 

 biological enigmas to which I have referred ; but he who 

 declares that they can never be solved by the scientific 

 method is to my mind as rash as the man of the early 

 sixteenth century would have been had he declared it 

 utterly impossible that the problem of talking across the 

 Atlantic Ocean should ever be solved. 



8 8. — The Wide Domain of Science 



If I have put the case of science at all correctly, 

 the reader will have recognised that modern science does 

 much more than demand that it shall be left in undis- 

 turbed possession of what the theologian and metaphysician 

 please to term its " legitimate field." It claims that the 

 whole range of phenomena, mental as well as physical — 

 the entire universe — is its field. It asserts that the 

 scientific method is the sole gateway to the whole region 

 of knowledge. The word science is here used in no 

 narrow sense, but applies to all reasoning about facts 

 which proceeds, from their accurate classification, to the 

 appreciation of their relationship and sequence. The 

 touchstone of science is the universal validity of its results 

 for all normally constituted and duly instructed minds. 

 Because the glitter of the great metaphysical systems 

 becomes dross when tried by this touchstone, we are 



