RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 745 



banishing them from the scientific vocabulary. Such 

 conceptions have always crept in again, proving that 

 they are indispensable even to the purely scientific 

 comprehension or description of natural objects, or of 

 nature as a whole. 



It is not surprising, therefore, that an independent 

 examination of the ultimate conceptions which science 

 makes use of, or which it evolves, should have been a 

 task which has occupied some of the greatest intellects 

 of our period, and that the problem arising from this 

 should form a fitting transition from the purely scientific 

 to the philosophical portion of this history. 



Now, if we try to characterise in the briefest possible 

 manner the general problems which scientific thought as 

 a whole has definitely formulated and placed before the 

 philosophical thinker, there are two words which stand 

 out prominently as indicating the two grand and com- 

 plementary conceptions which either underlie all scien- 

 tific inquiry or result from it. The first of these has 

 already been stated. We saw that exact or scientific 

 thought assumes that there exists in Nature an in- 

 telligible ORDER. The closer definition of this order in 

 the so-called laws of the cosmos has to be ascertained 

 by experience, and has been the subject of the fore- 

 going narrative. The subject which remains for phil- 

 osophical discussion is not any special form of order, 

 but the fact that any kind of order exists at all, and 

 that it is accessible to the human intellect. Clearly 

 this is a question which affects Nature, the object, as 

 much as the human Intellect, the subject. 



But if the idea of Order underlies all scientific thought, 



