THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 83 



from being likenesses between what things seem to be to the senses, 

 have more and more become analogies between propositions made 

 regarding what things do, regarding how things act upon, are related 

 to and determine each other. 



Our knowledge of JSTature, therefore, illustrates progress from a 

 stage in which external objects are viewed as so much doing — from 

 a stage in which they seem more or less isolated, more or less inde- 

 pendent of each other — to a stage in which we know them as acting 

 and interacting, and therefore, hj virtue of this action and inter- 

 action, as interrelated and interdependent. It was because man had 

 to begin with the thought of the world around him as a series of 

 unconnected aspects that he fell into the error of regarding every ob- 

 ject as containing vdthin itself the powers which it put forth; it was 

 by gTadually progressing to the knowledge of the external system as 

 a process that he discovered how inextricably the smallest " flower 

 in the crannied wall " is linked to its vastest environment, and how 

 dependent must be the mechanism of the molecule, as well as 

 of the solar system, upon the whole universe Power which we call 

 cosmos. 



Thus also is it with man's method of interpreting the external 

 world system. At first unable to fully perceive his own relation to 

 that system, as part of his inability to perceive general cosmic rela- 

 tions, and therefore viewing himself as more or less independent of 

 Nature — as something imposed upon it rather than as something aris- 

 ing out of it — he naturally sought to force it for purposes of explana- 

 tion into the narrow limits of his knowledge of himself, of his feelings, 

 his thoughts, his institutions. But as he grew in the power to com- 

 prehend his place in the system of things — to understand the way 

 in which the objects and forces of the world were related to each other, 

 together with the way in which he, as knowing organism, was related 

 to the universe — he gradually ceased from his vain striving to subject 

 the cosmos to himself, and at last learned not only to subordinate him- 

 self to the cosmos, but to trace to it unreservedly the whole method 

 and meaning of his origin as a living, thinking organism. Man 

 in the beginning could be no more than the measure of the uni- 

 verse. That he has come at last, wielding the objective method, 

 to be its measurer, is the culmination of a struggle between false 

 and true ways of interpreting Nature which has had the whole 

 history of human thought for its arena, and for its final triumph 

 the establishment of the objective or scientific method of inves- 

 tigation upon impregnable foundations. 



