THE HUMAN SCIENCES 35 



And it follows that even these more rigorous kinds of 

 knowledge are apt to be the victims of analogy. They 

 play with conceptions as ordinary thought does with 

 mental pictures, and apply old principles to facts without 

 inquiring whether they fit them or not. Man never 

 knows how metaphorical he is. 



These considerations apply with great force to all the 

 sciences of human life, but especially to that of human 

 society. Both the psychology of the individual and the 

 history of thought on the large ; .scale of its philosophical 

 systems show that man ^iijgjg^ himself, and of the 

 products and activities of his Own^gpirit, last of all. His 

 coming to himself is always a return from the world. It 

 follows, therefore, that he seeks to interpret himself in the 

 light of the world. 1 He contemplates the order of human 

 relations through the medium of the more obvious and 

 familiar order of the physical cosmos. He applies to the 

 former categories of thought that have assisted him to 

 comprehend the latter. He thus thinks in^jnetaphors, 

 andjsjiot aware that he does so. And, consequently, the 

 sciences of man, and especially of human society, are ' ' the 

 playground of analogies." These unconscious analogies, 

 in the next place, are allowed to fill the part of scientific 

 hypotheses ; and the power of a hypothesis of explaining 

 facts, if it is true, or of falsifying facts, if it is false, is not 

 easily measured. Hypotheses are constructive, and not 

 merely colligating, conceptions. We live under their 



1 It is quite true that man interprets the world in terms of his self, and 

 that not only religious, but all knowledge is anthropomorphical. But it 

 is also true that only by rational interaction with the world is man a self 

 at all. A man's world and a man's living experience, which is his self, 

 are two names for the same thing. A self separated from the world, and 

 a world separated from the self are abstract unrealities. 



