Science of the Future : A Forecast 



With regard to the absolute datum question 

 we have seen that Science has two alternatives 

 before it — either to be merely intellectual and to 

 seek for its start-point in some quite external 

 (and imaginary) thing like the Atom, or to be 

 divine and to seek for its absolute in the innermost 

 recesses of humanity. We have two similar 

 alternatives in the doctrine of Evolution, which 

 looks either to one end of the scale or the other 

 for its interpretation — either to the amoeba or to 

 the man — to something it knows next to nothing 

 of, or to that which it knows most of. Goethe, 

 when gazing at a fan-palm at Padua, conceived 

 the idea of leaf-metamorphosis, which he after- 

 wards enunciated in the now accepted doctrine 

 that all parts of a plant — seed-vessel, pistil, stamens, 

 petals, sepals, stalk, etc. — may be regarded as 

 modifications of a leaf or leaves. In this view 

 the distinctions between the parts arc effaced, and 

 we have only one part instead of many — but the 

 question is *' what is that part ? " It is of course 

 arbitrary to call it a leaf, for since it is continually 

 varying it is at one time a leaf, and at another a 

 stalk, and then a petal or a sepal, and so forth. 



only a process of deductive reasoning — a body of empirical know- 

 ledge strengthened and tied together by bands of logic ; the study 

 of Natural History would be primarily an affectionate intimacy 

 with the habits of animals and plants, and classification would be 

 treated as a secondary matter and as a help to the former ; Physiology 

 would be studied in the first place by the method of Health — 

 the pure body — becoming gradually transparent with all its organs 

 to the eye of the mind — and dissection would be used to corroborate 

 and correct the results thus attained ; and so on. 



