10 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



about. He does not find it economical to think 

 about ultimates, and yet it must be confessed 

 that in spite of himself he often sees them creep- 

 ing insidiously into scientific thought. 



Lightly as we have touched upon the prob- 

 lem of absolute truth, we must pass even more 

 rapidly over the age-old problem of the real 

 and the ideal; the objective and the subjective. 

 If we had not studied the motion of the planets 

 we know that someone else would, with like re- 

 sults; and while we turn our telescopes upon 

 the moon, children are crying for that same 

 moon and dogs are baying at it. On the other 

 hand, we realize that even in the act of register- 

 ing our sense impressions they are being pro- 

 foundly modified owing to the instincts that 

 have come to us from long heredity, owing to 

 our individual memories, to our sensations, and 

 above all, to our communications with other 

 human beings. 



How different your dog Towser would look to 

 you if you had never seen him before, and espe- 

 cially if you had never seen any dog before. The 

 word 'dog' is an abstraction from many Tow- 

 sers, and as we cull the traits of similarity from 

 a larger and larger mass of observations we 

 proceed from the special to the general. Tow- 



