68 Scientific Truth and tJie Scientific Spirit 



inexplicable on the basis of our present knowledge. There is in the 

 make-up of our personalities a tendency to classify the inexplicable 

 as transcendental and to believe that in living matter there operate 

 forces that can never be scrutinized and examined as we examine 

 the forces of the ordinary physical world. That tendency of mind, 

 from which I say few are wholly free, is, when unchecked, a nega- 

 tion of the Scientific Spirit, and to a mind more or less influenced 

 by it there can be no Scientific Truth, for the latter is the product 

 of the Scientific Spirit. 



There may be some who will ask " What is Truth? " They ask 

 the question not in the spirit and intent of the Procurator of Judaea, 

 but because they are perplexed by the irreconcilable interpretations 

 of the term, '' Truth," as advanced in the discussions amongst the 

 different schools of philosophical thought. The perplexity is to a 

 certain extent natural, but it ought not to prevent us from finding 

 an answer to the question which will meet the tests, not only of 

 daily life, but also of the world of science, as a brief consideration 

 of the doctrines of two diametrically opposed schools of thought 

 may show. 



Amongst the adherents of one of these schools, which I may, 

 for the sake of brevity, call the Absolute School, Truth is a concept 

 reached by processes of more or less rigid speculation and reason- 

 ing, in which, however, introspection plays a large part, explaining 

 the world, reality and mind in terms which are wholly of dialectical 

 coinage. The central doctrine of this System of thought is that 

 reality and appearance are but manifestations of the activity of an 

 entity freed or absolved from all limitations of time and capable 

 of all that we can conceive and more, an entity that is, in conse- 

 quence, denominated the Absolute. The Absolute is, in the lan- 

 guage, some would say, in the jargon, of the School, but Truth itself 

 because it is claimed to be the product of the final analysis of the 

 phenomena of Mind and Reality. 



This concept of Truth commends itself to minds of a rare type, 

 chiefly those of the cloister or the study, but never to those repre- 

 sentative of the world of action. I do not wish to be understood as 

 deriding it or the processes by which it is reached, for I recognize 

 that the human mind must explore its own depths and exploit its 



