74 THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE 



enunciation. But the same is generally true even 

 of the humanistic and scientific philosophies. The 

 mind is merely the mill, and what comes out depends 

 only on what you put in. This does not detract 

 from the value of the process, assuming, of course, 

 as in mathematical analysis, that the mind is 

 capable of reasoning correctly, and does not introduce 

 errors of its own. In every sphere the solution 

 of a problem is a vastly important step forward 

 from its enunciation, though errors usually arise from 

 the latter rather than from the former. 



The humanistic philosophy feeds its mill with man 

 and it gets out man. Man is the raw material, the 

 reasoning machine, and the sole judge of the product, 

 whether it is true or false, noble or base. Thinking 

 that he was appealing beyond himself to a higher 

 external power, and often indeed claiming direct 

 inspiration therefrom, he created deities in the image 

 of himself, and endowed them with various aspects of 

 his own nature. There was no break in the vicious 

 circle of thought, no real appeal beyond his own 

 instincts and intuitions, until men of science, in 

 their study of the laws of external nature, became 

 acquainted with a very different and totally im- 

 personal aspect of Truth, and a very different ruler 

 of the universe than that which hitherto had appealed 

 to the uninstructed and self-centred imagination of 

 man. Now, in so far as the realm of external nature 

 interacts with, and in the most fundamental sense 

 possible, absolutely controls humanity, the mistake 

 of neglecting it is serious. Conclusions which may 

 have appealed irresistibly to the jury of the human 

 intellect for thousands of years may be false, and 

 may indeed raise the question whether man in fact is 

 not essentially insane. That would certainly be the 

 verdict at the present moment, if any outside rational 

 being surveyed the world, seeing nothing but the 



