5 30 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



it is that strength which enables him to hold his own 

 in the struggle of life. 



In this Graiiwiar I have endeavoured to emphasise 

 this side of science and scientific law ; I have striven to 

 indicate how natural law is a product of the human 

 reason and how the correlated growth of the reasoning 

 and perceptive faculties in man, assisted by the survival 

 of the fittest, may possibly have left us with a normal 

 type of man for whom only that is perception which can 

 be reasoned about, and for whom the reason is keen 

 enough to appreciate and analyse what is perceived 

 (p. 104)/ Long and difficult must have been the 

 evolution by which these results have been achieved ; but 

 they ought at least to give man confidence in his own 

 powers and assurance that with further growth will come 

 still keener perception and still greater intellectual grasp. 

 We have no right to assume that the development of man 

 is completed. On the contrary, we have every right to 

 infer that the drift of evolution which we can trace from 

 primitive man to Aristotle, and from Aristotle to the 

 scientist of to-day, will continue the same, at least as long 

 as man's physical environment is not materially modified. 

 To deny that our perception is wider and deeper, and that 

 our analysis is more subtle than that of the great Greek 

 philosopher, is to deny the drift of man's past evolution, 

 to deny all that gives history its deep human significance. 

 The growth of knowledge since the days of Aristotle 

 oueht to be sufficient to convince us that we have no 

 reason to despair of man's ultimately mastering any 

 problem whatever of life or mind, however obscure and 

 difficult it may at present appear. But we ought to 

 remember what this mastery means ; it does not denote 

 an explanation of the routine of perception ; it is solely 

 the description of that routine in brief conceptual 

 formulae. It is the historical resume, not the transcen- 



1 Man certainly fails in his attempt to reason about things he does not 

 perceive — about the "beyond" of sense-impression. We have no evidence, 

 however, that would lead us to infer that any group of perceptions is beyond 

 rational analysis now or after more complete classification. 



