374 HUMANISM xix 



tion. When the philosopher has shown that no a priori 

 impossibilities block the pathway of discovery, and no 

 authentic fact can be too anomalous for explanation, 

 when he has cleared men s eyes of the prejudices which 

 obstruct a clear prevision of the goal and has aroused a 

 sufficient will to know, a sufficient conviction that it is well 

 to look before we plunge, and to try to see whither we 

 go before we go, he must modestly stand aside, and 

 leave the empirical explorer into the puzzling mazes of 

 psychical science to cut down the barbed-wire entangle 

 ments of hostile human prejudice, and step by step to 

 fight his way through the thickets of complex and 

 perplexing fact. And so the glory of discovery will not 

 be his, but will reward the scientist who has borne the 

 labour and danger of the day of battle. And yet the 

 discoverer will owe perhaps the faith which sustained his 

 courage and endurance in no small measure to the 

 apparently unmoved spectator who watched the struggle 

 from afar, and this faith may justify the thinker also 

 when he is called upon to render an account of the use to 

 which he has put his powers. 



