FIRST PRINCIPLES 3 



with understanding. The attempt to define its scope is 

 likely to result in confining it. 



Although all intelligent knowledge is science, the term 

 as commonly used has certain limitations. It is especially 

 applied to the observation of natural phenomena and to the 

 discovery of the laws which govern them, and hence it 

 has come to be almost synonymous with inductive science. 

 Pure speculation, if such a process be possible, belongs to 

 the province of philosophy, which province also includes the 

 deductions which result from the analysis of consciousness. 

 In some usages we find the term ''science" limited to the 

 natural sciences; as, for example, when we speak of " a man 

 of science. ' ' Yet, on the other hand, when the methods of 

 science are employed in the elucidation of work which is 

 strictly Man's and not Nature's, the use of the methods leads 

 to the appropriation of the name. No one, for example, 

 can assert of any event recorded in history that it is a fact, 

 in the same sense in which a biologist is justified in describ- 

 ing a particular stage through which an egg passes in the 

 development of a chick, as a fact ; yet the work of an 

 historian is said to be scientific when, wishing to supply an 

 event which was not recorded by the chroniclers of the time 

 in which it presumably occurred, he adopts the same induc- 

 tive method which a biologist would follow if he wished to 

 figure to himself a stage in development which for any 

 reason it is impossible for him to observe. On the same 

 grounds, we speak of the science of criticism and of various 

 other subjects far removed from the study of Nature. 



Reduced to its lowest terms, science is the observation of 

 phenomena and the colligation of the results of observation 

 into groups. By observation we discover that a particular 

 fish is coloured like the seaweeds which grow on the rocks 

 in the neighbourhood where it is found, and where we further 

 observe it to be feeding. In other places where the growth 

 upon the rocks is differently coloured, we observe that the 

 fish are differently coloured, but that they still resemble the 



