18 THE UNFATHOMED UNIVERSE 



" promise and potency of all terrestrial life ", is exhaust- 

 ively described in terms of the dynamics of particles, then 

 we cannot by any ingenuity evolve the conscious out of it; 

 if on general grounds we feel bound to regard conscious life 

 as evolved from Tyndall's " matter ", then the reality of that 

 " matter " could not be exhaustively described in terms of the 

 dynamics of particles. 



" All explanation of the higher by the lower is philosoph- 

 ically a hysteron-proteron. The antecedents assigned are 

 not the causes of the consequents, for by antecedents the 

 naturalistic theories mean the antecedents in abstraction 

 from their consequents — the antecedents taken as they ap- 

 pear in themselves, or as we might suppose them to be if 

 no such consequents had ever issued from them. So con- 

 ceived, however, the antecedents (matter and energy, for ex- 

 ample) have no real existence — they are mere entia rationis, 

 abstract aspects of the concrete fact which we call the 

 universe '^ (Pringle-Pattison, Mans Place in the Cosmos, 

 pp. 11-12). 



(/) The aim of science is not so much ^^ to give an ac- 

 count of the whole matter ", as used to be said, but rather to 

 work out, patiently and piecemeal, a number of descriptions 

 and formulations of diverse aspects, each for a certain pur- 

 pose, by certain methods, in certain symbols. The chemist's 

 account of a peacock's tail is an abstraction, and so is the 

 physicist's, the biologist's, and the psychologist's. But even 

 when all these results, reached by scientific abstraction, are 

 pooled, we have not " an account of the whole matter "— - 

 of " the positive full-orbed reality ". That correlation often 

 has to wait for genius. Moreover, the scientific synthesis, if 

 it be achieved, requires to be assimilated with what the 

 artist, the poet, and the genuine lover of birds may be able 



