104 HUMANISM 



VI 



temporal context may be neglected, not because we are 

 convinced of its theoretic validity, but because we are 

 constrained by its practical convenience. We want to be 

 able to make predictions about the future behaviour of things 

 for the purpose of shaping our own conduct accordingly. 

 Hence attempts to forecast the future have been the 

 source of half the superstitions as well as of the whole 

 of the science of mankind. But no method of divination 

 ever invented could compete in ingenuity and gorgeous 

 simplicity with the assumption of universal laws which 

 hold good without reference to time ; and so in the long 

 run it alone could meet the want or practical necessity 

 in question. 



In other words this assumption is a methodological 

 device, and ultimately reposes on the practical necessity of 

 discovering formulas for calculating events in the rough, 

 without awaiting or observing their occurrence. To assert 

 this methodological character of eternal truths is not, of 

 course, to deny their validity for it is evident that unless 

 the nature of the world had lent itself to a very consider 

 able extent to such interpretation, the assumption of 

 eternal laws would have served our purposes as little as 

 those of astrology, necromancy, chiromancy, and catoptro- 

 mancy. What, however, must be asserted is that this 

 assumption is not an ultimate term in the explanation of 

 the world. 



This does not, of course, matter to Science, which is 

 not concerned with such ultimate explanation, and for 

 which the assumption is at all events ultimate enough. 

 But it does matter to philosophy that the ultimate theoretic 

 assumption should have a methodological character. To 

 say that we assume the truth of abstraction because we 

 wish to attain certain ends, is to subordinate theoretic 

 truth to a teleological implication ; to say that, the 

 assumption once made, its truth is proved by its prac 

 tical working, by the way in which it stands the test of 

 experience, is to assert this same subordination only a 

 little less directly. For the question of the practical 

 working of a truth will always ultimately be found 



