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 with 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. 1 



1 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 



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