THE HUMAN SCIENCES 45 



and still another to support the second? "Deny A," we 

 say, "and you must deny B ; deny B and you must deny 

 C ; deny C and you must deny D, the truth of which you 

 yourself admit, and which, therefore, you cannot deny 

 without stultifying your very thought, and bringing down 

 the whole system of experience in incoherent ruins." The 

 strength of the whole body of an organised system of ideas, 

 such as a science, or a philosophic or theological doctrine, 

 belongs to every element within it ; to deny the element 

 is to discredit the principle to which it is related ; and to 

 discredit the principle of the system is to demand the re- 

 interpretation of every part of it. Knowledge, in fact, is 

 in this respect analogous to the cosmos of reality which 

 it is meant to represent ; it is held up by itself ; it is the 

 equipoise of its own constituents, and built to the sound of 

 its own music. 



The discovery of the organic (or hyper-organic) nature 

 of knowledge involves epistemological consequences not 

 even yet worked out so far do they reach, and so long a 

 task is it to reinterpret the phenomena confused by the use 

 of the mechanical metaphor which for long ages has mis- 

 directed the endeavour of human thought. And the 

 theory of human conduct has fared even worse at the hands 

 of the same metaphor. Even yet the idea of natural cause 

 is applied to the relation of man to his environment, with 

 the result that the futile controversy between determinism 

 and indeterminism goes on as merrily as ever, and that the 

 problem of human freedom is called insoluble as usual. 

 As usual, too, the confusion is due to a material metaphor. 

 For "natural cause" is as inapplicable to the relations in 

 which man as a rational being stands to anything, as is 

 the idea of colour to the virtues. Mind is never either 



