354 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



a forest, the special preserve of a caste, which it was 

 sacrilege to hew down. Whether the battle will be now 

 transferred to a " special creation " of the ultimate element 

 of life remains to be seen, but in saying that science is at 

 present ignorant as to the ultimate origin of life, we must 

 be careful to allow no metaphysical hypothesis of an 

 " ultra -scientific cause" to take root. We trust that 

 light will come to science here, as it has come in equally 

 difficult problems in the past ; and not impossibly this 

 light will come in the direction of the spontaneous genera- 

 tion of life. It is not before or behind in the sequence of 

 cause and effect that we must insert the supernatural full 

 stop. There is no need to cloak ignorance at distant 

 stages with mystery ; the mystery lies at hand in every 

 change of sense-impression, in the fact that knowledge is 

 at all times a description, but never an explanation of 

 that change. The spontaneous generations of life and of 

 consciousness are not conceptions which reduce the 

 mystery of being ; they but knit more closely together 

 the veil of sense-impressions which bounds the field of 

 knowledge and enshrouds the fundamental mysteries 

 of why we perceive at all and why we perceive by 

 routine. 



S 1 1. — On the Relation of the Coiceptual Description to the 



Phenomenal World 



The reader will have noticed that the standpoint 

 which the author of this volume has reached through an 

 analysis of physical conceptions is largely confirmed when 

 we turn to biological science. Hypotheses of heredity, of 

 the generation of life, and of the origin of consciousness 

 are clearly formulae which attempt to describe the routine 

 of our perceptual experience ; and they do this by aid of 

 a conceptual model which not only resumes our present 

 perceptions, but enables us to carry back into the past, or 

 forward into the future, the sequence of scientific causa- 

 tion (p. 128). That the conceptual model and our 

 perceptual experience agree at all points where we can 



