72 The Scientific Method. 



world outside of us, and that our whole morality and religion 

 consist in somehow putting ourselves into right relation with 

 it. Science, however, accepts unmutilated the great world- 

 fact, studies it unhampered by this confused and halting 

 theory, and gives us that knowledge of it without which we 

 never could put ourselves into right relation with it. Which 

 of the two better subserves the cause of truth, morality, and 

 religion ? Verily, it demands only a clear head and a sound 

 conscience for truth to answer that question in favor of sci- 

 ence and its matchless method. 



Idealism and science both rest ultimately upon a mere 

 fact one and the same fact the fact of observation or 

 direct knowledge. But, while idealism curtails this fact by 

 half and arbitrarily limits it to self-observation, or direct 

 knowledge by the individual of his own consciousness or 

 thought, science takes it in its fullness, comprehensiveness, 

 and unity, as world-observation, or direct knowledge by the 

 human race of the world itself, including the individual and 

 his self-consciousness. 



With this difference in starting-point corresponds neces- 

 sarily a difference in method. Immured hopelessly in his 

 own consciousness, as inclusive of all that he can observe or 

 directly know, the idealistic individual struggles in vain to 

 arrive at knowledge of a real universe by the method of 

 inference alone that is, by the method of hypothesis with- 

 out verification. Denying all direct observation of a real 

 world, he can neither begin with observation nor end with 

 observation, except within the limits of his own individual 

 consciousness ; and this gives him no other individual, no 

 Nature, no God. Unable, however, to remain content with 

 himself as a substitute for universal being, and eager to ar- 

 rive at some solid ground for ethics and religion, he forgets 

 his logic, and tries to make faith do the work of knowledge. 

 But, as the whole history of thought proves, this attempt 

 eternally fails ; hypothesis without verification can be con- 

 verted into knowledge by no device of inference, postulate, 

 deduction, or faith, and the idealistic method of pure indi- 

 vidualism breaks down in utter failure, theoretically and 

 practically alike. 



But science is fettered by no such arbitrary and ruinous 

 curtailment of its method. The scientific individual begins 

 with direct observation as knowledge in the first instance, 

 and he proceeds to enlarge this original knowledge by the 

 scientific method of hypothesis with verification that is, he 



