136 THE AIM AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD. 



it seems necessary to determine what are the exact admissions 

 implied by one's applause. I am prepared to admit that the 

 results of Science have this economical value ; prepared to admit 

 that by Natural Selection or in some other way Nature may 

 have arranged that Science shall be pursued so that this value 

 shall be secured to the race; but, as before, I hesitate when 

 asked to grant that this relevance to purpose constitutes the 

 essence of the results in question. And Humanism is nothing 

 more than an interesting genetic psychology if we do not take 

 it as telling us not merely the circumstances under which we 

 come to recognise such things as thinghood, or the conservation 

 of energy, but what they are prior to our recognition. My own 

 view of the principle of the conservation of energy I have 

 endeavoured to explain. It is a concept by means of which 

 a .definite range of given facts is made intelligible to 

 an individual thinker. In consequence of this circumstance 

 it has j an economical value. Further, it is the property 

 of " secondary constructions," into which such concepts 

 and the corresponding primary facts enter, that they lead to- 

 the " apperception " of new primary facts reals or relations 

 between reals this being the external characteristic which 

 distinguishes the scientific from other attempts to render the 

 primary facts intelligible. Finally, the conception is a con- 

 vention in that another could conceivably have been found to 

 render the same facts intelligible, and, if " scientific," would 

 liave led to the recognition of the same real relations between 

 the real things. The conception, in fact, plays the part which 

 Lotze attributes to all ideas the part of a tool which fits the 

 mind and also fits reality. 



If pressed to consider also the case of thinghood, I should 

 have first to remark that I find between concepts of this order 

 and the concepts of Science a distinct break. In this I differ 

 from Mach, who does not appear to distinguish the process by 

 which we supply a core to a mass of sensations, and so create 

 a "thing" from the process by which we make a secondary 



