150 SCIENCE AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 



are such that the first includes the second . . . they are but one 

 thing in two aspects. Their connection, then, is absolute and uni- 

 versal. . . .'39 Experience, 'in many cases, in astronomy, optics, 

 acoustics, . . . ascertains that certain existing things present the 

 required characters. ... In all these cases the necessary proposi- 

 tions are applicable, and the real data have the intrinsic connection 

 which Kant and Mill deny them.'^o 



The ultimate justification for such a belief lies in what Taine, in 

 his concluding chapter, calls 'The Explanatory Reason of Things'. 

 In the sciences of construction, 'AH the theorems are demonstrated 

 by analysis, by the analysis of the terms of the definitions.' 4i In the 

 sciences of experience, 'the resources are fewer and the difficulties 

 greater'42; experiments and inductions are required; but, 'if the 

 processes of discovery have been diflferent, the structure of things 

 has been shown to be the same' ^^ A general law, like an axiom, 

 is simple and universal and contains many lesser and more 

 complex laws within it; the latter are compared to pillars of a 

 cathedral which 'all indicate by their gradual diminution and 

 converging directions, that a loftier arch must finally reunite 

 them'. 44 



Finally, we come to the consequences of this belief for our real 

 subject-matter, namely, the natural and historical sciences, in 

 which the organic principles of Cuvier and Geoflfroy Saint- 

 Hilaire reign: the former stressed the 'uses' or functions of organs; 

 the latter, their 'holding a place in a plan' or system: 'A part, then, 

 has the property of exciting by its presence the presence of a 

 whole system of parts, arranged according to a fixed pattern, 

 which gives us the rough framework of the whole animal, and has, 

 besides, the property of determining by its structure and function, 

 the structure and function of the other parts which gives us the 

 whole structure and group of the functions of the complete 

 animal.' 45 On the basis of the latter principle, a palaeontologist 

 can reconstruct a skeleton from a jawbone, and an historian can 

 do the same for a civilization from a poem. 



An additional question in the natural sciences, supplementing 

 those of 'function' and 'place in a plan', is that o^ origin, exempli- 

 fied by Darwin's theory. 46 This is the special province of history, 

 which is concerned with elements both of permanence and of 

 change: 'To form the species, there was a fixed condition, the 

 transmission of an older general type, and changing conditions, 

 the new circumstances which, selecting the subsequent ancestors, 



