Science of the Future : A Forecast 



Science in searching for a permanently valid 

 and purely intellectual representation of the uni- 

 verse has, as already said, been searching for a 

 thing which does not exist. The very facts of 

 Nature, as we call them, are at least half feeling. 

 If we try to clean the feeling out of a fact and to 

 produce a statement which shall be devoid of the 

 human or sense element, it simply amounts to 

 cleaning the meaning out ; and though our resulting 

 statement may be exact it is nugatory and of no 

 value. We might as well try to take the clay 

 out of a brick. It must never be forgotten that 

 the logical processes important as they are 

 cannot stand by themselves, have no standing 

 ground of their own. They presuppose assump- 

 tions and are the expression of things that are 

 unreasoning, perhaps illogical. The strictest 

 logic is a mere hooking together of links in a chain, 

 and the last link is of no use you can put no 

 stress on it unless the first is secured some- 

 where. The strength of the intellectual chain is 

 no greater than that of the staple from which it 

 hangs and that is a human feeling The strength 

 of Euclid is no greater than that of the axioms 

 and they are feelings ; they are unreasoning state- 

 ments of which all that we can say is, " I feel 

 like that." In fact all the propositions of Geo- 

 metry are nothing but the analysis and elaborate 

 expression, so to speak, of these primary convictions 

 and the Geometry-structure stands and falls 

 with them. There is no such thing as intellectual 

 truth that is, I mean, a truth which can be stated 



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