INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 35 
facts, built up with the greatest care and the soundest of 
judgment by the adoption of those reliable methods of interro- 
gation which form the foundations of science. This field of 
philosophy, then, is the domain of the true naturalist—perhaps 
one might almost say the super-naturalist. 
It will not be easy to define Nature to everybody’s satisfac- 
tion if we admit into the definition, as some may be inclined to 
do, some theory of the ultimate constitution of things. But 
we all know what we mean by “‘ Nature,” and for our present 
purposes we will say that “‘ Nature” is the external world 
unaltered by man ; that a natural thing is an apparent entity 
in this external world, while a naturalist is a person who 
endeavours to understand the relation of natural things to 
each other. 
It is both customary and complimentary to assume that 
the object of the Nature student in familiarizing himself with 
the phenomena of natural things is the discovery of truth, and 
pertaining to some particular group of natural things in 
which he happens to be interested. Further, the belief that 
truth immutable underlies Nature is universal, and it is 
commonly supposed that this is the truth towards which the 
results of science tend with ever-increasing precision to 
approach. 
It is not my intention to discuss the nature of ultimate 
truth at all, nor, indeed, in the first part of my Paper to show 
what the truths of natural history really are, for this cannot 
be profitably undertaken till we clearly understand what they 
are not. 
The ultimate question which a naturalist asks of anything 
is, ““ How does it come to exist ?’’ And this is the question 
which I propose we put to the truths of natural history. How 
do they come to exist ? In other words, how do we interpret 
Nature ? 
There is no question, of course, that the object of science 
(and all science is natural history) should be to discover the 
most complete and adequate conception of the relation of 
different facts to each other, or, to use the less accurate and 
more popular phraseology, “the cause of things.” All 
science has this object in view, and the philosophy which has 
