74 The Scientific Method. 



formed opinion of all whose proved acquirement has made 

 them lawful judges in that special department of investiga- 

 tion this process, I say, is an integral part of the scientific 

 method, and constitutes its irrefutable superiority to the 

 method of idealism or pure individualism. Idealism con- 

 ceives no higher authority, criterion, or test of truth than 

 the private reason of the individual ; but science, developed 

 into philosophy, conceives the organization of innumerable 

 private reasons into the one universal reason of the race, 

 and, in this organized reason of mankind, which is infinitely 

 removed from a mere multitude of individual reasons as 

 such, discerns that supreme authority, test, or criterion of 

 truth from which dissent is ignorance, in its only intelligi- 

 ble sense. In the unanimous agreement of all who, by 

 actual achievement or by admirable work done, have com- 

 pelled universal recognition of their right to pass a weighty 

 judgment in any branch of science that is, in the unani- 

 mous consensus of the competent lies the supreme tribunal 

 which alone can decide authoritatively what is known and 

 what is not known. All questions remain open questions 

 in science until absolute unanimity is reached; no judg- 

 ment can be claimed to have been authoritatively given 

 until dissent has already died down into silence among the 

 judges themselves. But their unanimous voice is the high- 

 est authority or test of truth to which man, for whom there 

 is no infallibility anywhere, can possibly appeal. It is in 

 virtue of this authority alone that schools and universities 

 exist ; for how could they exist if there were no solidly es- 

 tablished truth to teach ? On the wall of Science Hall, at 

 Smith College, I read, a few weeks since, this simple and 

 impressive inscription : 



" The Gift of Alfred Theodore Lilly, to teach the Truth in 

 Nature." 



Yes, to teach the truth in Nature, not, as idealism con- 

 fusedly claims, on the warrant of any individual's deduction, 

 inference, assumption, postulate, or faith, but on the war- 

 rant of the consensus of the competent alone, on the au- 

 thority of that organic reason of humanity which the con- 

 sensus of the competent alone has any shadow of right to 

 represent, to interpret, and to expound to teach the truth 

 in Nature; for that, and nothing else, every school and 

 every university exists, even when ignorant and incompe- 

 tent professors deny all knowledge of that truth, and teach 

 their own empty vagaries in its stead. It is not an open 



