THE PHILOSOPHICAL LIMITS OF SCIENCE. 329 



As a reaction against all this, th<;re was a cry that science 

 had become bankrupt. That was a philosophical exaggeration. 

 The credit of science was never, in fact, better. Some scientists 

 and especially biologists, had made promises and prophecies 

 that had signally failed. It wais only their vain hopes that had 

 collapsed, because they had given their science too much credit. 



The movement culminated in about 1905 ; and the result 

 was to define more clearly the limits of biology. By helping 

 to keep it within its natural boundaries, philosophical discus- 

 sion had rendered it a distinct service. A French biologist 

 (Grasset, Les Limites de la Biologie p. 179) writing as a 

 philosopher, maintains that philosophic liberalism consists in 

 saying to all sciences : " Do not issue from your natural limits, 

 and your domain will be respected. Do not encroach and you 

 will not be invaded." 



Finally, philosophy establishes the existence of other planes 

 of thought, useful or pleasant, where scientific processes alone 

 are insufficient. Some of these may be called higher planes, 

 some lower, and some collateral. There are literature, for 

 example, economics, theology, and ethics. To deal with these 

 topics only by the scientific method. would be to destroy them. 



In the case of ethics the resultant evils and falsity have 

 been brought rather sadly before us through the War. Science, 

 unlimited by ethical considerations, does not make for truth or 

 happiness or the common welfare. In literature we may in- 

 stance Zola, who was touched by the ultra-cientific desire for 

 method. What he has done best is the inspiration of his art; 

 the worst is partly the result of a wooden eftort to suliordinate 

 literature to science. 



There are important branches of our mental activity which 

 have their own methods, entirely different from those of ex- 

 perimental science. But they are the only valid way in these 

 spheres ; and it would be illiberal to hold that they are not 

 methods of knowledge, because they are not the ways of natural 

 science. 



These considerations will help, 1 hope, to set forth some of 

 the reasons for muttial respect between philosophy and science. 



Each has threatened to absorb the other at different times. 

 The extreme philosophic view is that which claims all reality 

 to be mind. The extreme scientific view excludes all but matter 

 from the realm of the real. The attitude of scientific despair 

 gives it all up as hopelessly insoluble. 



The human attitude would seem to consist in recognising 

 these two realities, and in endeavouring to delimit their boun- 

 daries. 



{Finally received, February 4th, 1918.) 



