HUMANITY RULES THE SCIENCES. 303 



and women, but of flowers and horses, stars and streams : and dwells 

 upon them fondly, as if they were in its own sense alive. The 

 childhood of races as well as individuals is so vital and full-blooded 

 that it looks on the world and all it contains as a land of the living. 

 With no permission of afterthought, it deems and imagines struc- 

 turally, and its organization is the mould in which every conception 

 runs. It believes that it is enfranchized, not limited by brains; 

 and it knows that departure from these leads to nothing but folly 

 and confusion ; space and matter, irrespective of man, are silly mon- 

 sters which it does not heed ; so flimsy that thought goes through 

 them as if there was nothing there. For the rest, the prime method 

 of humanity is, trust to the topness of the human head. Those 

 who belong to this method, send forth words that feed on time, 

 which feeds on all other things : words which already play with 

 everlasting flowers over the grave of many philosophies that have 

 been impertinent to the human form. 



We note then, among the first natures of our minds, the concep- 

 tion that there is an architectural human life among the beams and 

 rafters of the world; which conception is the ancester of science; 

 the natural loins of truth out of which come all the families of the 

 adult understanding : and we hold, that to repulse this nature is to 

 be brutal to the mighty mother, to bastardize knowledge, to begin 

 the sciences nowhere, to expect to find by starting without looking, 

 and, in fine, to select impossibility as the arena of our struggles. 

 The attempt has been made in the inductive sciences, and with what 

 success is known. Phenomena and their laws are the recognized 

 objects of these sciences; substances and causes are reckoned spuri- 

 ous : hollowness and superficiality are thus become the postulates 

 of knowledge. Yet causes are past exorcism, and science runs into 

 chronic " goose-skin" before these, its self-constituted foes. But 

 why has science been so successful ? In the first place, it only half 

 succeeds when it sees nothing but the matter and none of the mind 

 of nature, for in this case, its use is culinary, and not educational. 

 For what can a world of shadows, and rules of shadows, have to do 

 with God who is a substance, and with man who is a substance too? 

 There is no real instruction in formulas, however well they answer 

 to facts, unless one knows why the facts come under the formulas : 



