RUMINANT PHILOSOPHY 75 



physical aspects of the present struggle. Hitherto, 

 Nature destroyed merely such men as got in the way, 

 by chance and without any design, vindictive or 

 benevolent. But now, for the first time on such a 

 universal scale, Nature is organised to the uttermost 

 by man with the design of destroying man, and there 

 can be no question of her powers of accomplishing 

 the work to which she has been put. Philosophies 

 that have come down to us from the day of the 

 wooden horse of Troy are not capable of dealing with 

 such a new fact. 



In the experimental philosophy of science the raw 

 material is not man, but the ascertained facts of 

 external nature so far as these can be discovered 

 and established. The mill is still the human mind, 

 but the raw material is external to and independent 

 of the mind. That this is so is evidenced by no 

 dialectical argument, but by the state of the world 

 to-day and the progress it has made in the last 

 hundred years, since the new philosophy reached its 

 general and consistent fruition. Errors are still 

 possible, as the mind still enters into the conclusion. 

 But the mind is not now trying to lead, to dream 

 dreams or to see visions, but "to give up every 

 preconceived notion and to follow humbly wherever 

 and to whatsoever abysses Nature leads," as Huxley 

 said. The consensus arrived at when a number of 

 minds, so striving, reach by different roads the 

 same result in their pursuit of natural knowledge, is 

 unique. The Oriental mind, as the Japanese and 

 Hindu students of science have shown, meet on 

 common ground with the American and European 

 mind in the pursuit of natural science. Science is the 

 only aspect of Truth that is universal and independent 

 of the barriers that divide East from West and people 

 of one religion from those of another. The mind is 

 no longer dealing with its own unverifiable impres- 



