THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD 113 



hypothetical method may have been, yet it is the custom 

 of thought and in spite of it or even, in some way, be- 

 cause of it, scientific truth has nobly expanded, dis- 

 pelling ignorance and subjugating natural forces. But 

 because knowledge advances, objection should not be 

 made to a protest against what tends to embarrass a 

 more rapid advance. Such a protest is the value of 

 destructive criticism. The reason why scientific knowl- 

 edge advances in spite of hypotheses, those phantoms 

 of the imagination, is because hypothesis rarely pre- 

 cedes experiment. If we examine the work of the 

 experimenter of to-day, we find he still goes on calmly 

 working with apparatus and using it with the common 

 sense idea that he is using real objective matter in spite 

 of the attempt of the theorist to make it an attribute 

 of energy or electricity. The conclusions derived from 

 experiment and laws may be discussed and condemned 

 or approved according as they support a fashionable 

 hypothesis, but scientific hypothesis is much like re- 

 ligious dogma : although it may protest, yet in the end 

 it swerves around to accept all new facts. And in a 

 short time the despised fact is cited as a pillar, or at 

 least as a flying buttress of the hypothesis. 



While it is not possible to draw a definite boundary 

 line between the regions of physics and metaphysics, 

 still we may do so in a general way by saying that the 

 domain of physics is concerned with the discovery of 

 phenomena and the formulation of natural laws based 



