82 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



At first sight, then, knowledge may seem inextricably involved 

 in the process here described. If man can not know the external 

 system to which he must adapt himself save by assimilating it to 

 himself — save by interpreting it on the basis of analogies which he 

 discovers between his own body and its activities, and the world with 

 its activities — are we not committed by our very nature as organisms 

 to all the errors which that nature imposes upon us? If, in other 

 words, every effort to view the universe as it is, independently of us, 

 be rendered impossible by the very nature of the knowing process, 

 with what chance of success shall we seek to eliminate those vitalistic 

 and psychomorphic characters which seem to belong to that process 

 as its very warp and woof? In reality our knowledge inflicts upon 

 us no such dilemma. Man is the helpless " measure of the universe " 

 only to the extent that his reasoning processes are undeveloped. That 

 knowledge must always have a subjective element is undoubted, but 

 that man must always mistake the subjective vesture with which 

 things are clothed by the senses for the things themselves is an infer- 

 ence which the whole history of thought negatives. While his life 

 remained simple, primitive man could regard appearances as reali- 

 ties without prejudicing the overplus of utility brought to him by his 

 knowledge. Yet as his relation to the natural surroundings grew 

 in complexity, the importance of the reasoning process, with its veto 

 power over the deliverances of the senses, began to assert itself. At 

 first accepted with little or no demur, these deliverances came more 

 and more to be challenged in the interest of self-maintenance; and 

 finally, by expansion of a germ possessed by the mind in the begin- 

 ning, there was developed that way of dealing with the testimony of 

 appearances which we call the objective method. The evidence pre- 

 viously accepted had been, though on the whole useful, in large 

 measure misleading. For in appearances men saw and felt mainly 

 what ]^ature was for them, and only to a minor degree what the ex- 

 ternal world was for and in itself. The great need of the investigator 

 of Nature is to know what things are independently of man, in order 

 to know how they act on one another, as a means of knowing how 

 they will act on the human organism, and how that organism may 

 react on them in the interest of its own life. The prejudice done 

 by implicit reliance on sense testimony arose out of the fact that it 

 presented objects as largely unrelated to each other — as so much 

 being, rather than as so much doing, acting and interacting, deter- 

 mining and interdetermining. It became the function of reason to 

 develop, out of the material furnished by the senses, a knowledge of 

 the true nature of the system external to man and involving him in 

 its scope which we call universe. In the carrying out of this func- 

 tion the analogical process has remained, but the analogies utilized, 



