The Scientific Method. 77 



discerned through difficulties of distance, distortions of media, defects 

 of the seeing eye. It is as if the tree of knowledge had been uprooted 

 as a sapling, labeled Ultimate, and now were made to do duty for tho 

 thing of life and infinite expansion which knowledge really is. The 

 conflict we hear so much about is really, then, a conflict between new 

 science and old, or rather between new science and old guesses. Yet, 

 after all, too much must not be made of the war so strenuously waged 

 against theology ; it is but a particular case of the antagonism between 

 belated thought and new thought, which we can see just as plainly in 

 the exchanges, the courts, the legislatures, as in the churches ; views 

 essentially transient become crystallized into institutions and remain 

 long after their usefulness has departed. 



Of derivative alliance with the claims we have been glancing at is 

 the intuitional philosophy once counting many disciples in America, 

 but now a philosophy we hear comparatively little about. It ceased to 

 thrive when evolution explained intuitions as due to experiences, not 

 always either profound or clear which had coalesced in consciousness 

 so long as to have forgotten their age, and at last come to deny ever 

 having been born at all. To the objections of the intuitionalist* were 

 often joined those of other critics ; it was said man has other modes 

 of apprehension than by his intellect, and therefore the scientific meth- 

 od, intellectual as it is, can not have sway in more than a province of 

 human experience. For man feels no less than reasons ; indeed, he feels 

 more than he reasons. To this the answer is modern psychology, so 

 fast becoming an ordered, coherent, and luminous body of truth. 

 Emotion, sentiment, will, may count for the larger part of man, yet is 

 intellect their observer, examiner, and judge. The scales may balance 

 many things weightier than themselves. Science acknowledges no 

 limits to its jurisdiction, sets no bound to its future conquests. Dr. 

 Abbot has effectively gainsaid the position that knowledge can be 

 phenomenal only. We know a thing in its appearances, and if there be 

 no unknowable, then every problem of nature and life offers itself for 

 solution to faithful inquiry and patient thinking. 



In this connection let me say that an important educational ad- 

 vance in the scientific method is taking shape in the neighboring city. 

 For some time past Prof, Felix Adler. leader of the Society for Ethical 

 Culture, has been advocating the establishment of a School of Philos- 

 ophy and Applied Ethics. In this school it is proposed that the lead- 

 ing phases of philosophy shall be taught by men who are disciples of 

 the thinkers they expound. Religion is to be studied from the his- 

 torical standpoint, and the comparative method will be applied to the 

 study of the evolution of religious doctrines, institutions, and cere- 

 monies. 



