Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



reducing each branch of Science to its lowest 

 terms, we shall have to read it in the light of its 

 highest factors, and " take it up " into the Science 

 above — that we shall have to take up the mechani- 

 cal sciences into the physical, the physical into 

 the vital, the vital into the social and ethical, and 

 so forth, before we can understand them ? Is 

 it possible that the phenomena of Chemistry 

 only find their due place and importance in their 

 relation to living beings and processes ; that the 

 phenomena of vitality and the laws of Biology 

 and Zoology — Evolution included — can only be 

 " explained " by their dependence on self-hood — 

 both in plants and animals ; that Political Economy 

 and the Social Sciences (which deal v/ith men as 

 individual selves) must, to be undertstood aright, 

 be studied in the light of those great ethical principles 

 and enthusiasms, which to a certain extent over- 

 ride the individual self ; and that, finally. Ethics 

 or the study of moral problems is only compre- 

 hensible when the student has become aware of a 

 region beyond Ethics, into which questions of 

 morality and immorality, of right and wrong, 

 do not and cannot enter ? 



Of this reversal of the ordinary scientific method 

 Ruskin has given a great and signal instance in 

 his treatment of Political Economy ; it remains, 

 perhaps, for others to follow his example in the 

 other branches of Science. ^^ 



' Thus the study of Geometry would be primarily an education 

 of the eye, and the mind's eye, to the perception of geometrical 

 forms and facts, the judgment of angles, etc. — and secondarily 



