MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 8$ 



under examination. Thus natural science climbs its 

 slow and cautious way along the path of what it 

 calls the laws of Nature ; but it only gives this name 

 in the sense that there has been a constancy in the 

 conjunctions of past experience, a verification of the 

 tentative generalisation suggested by this, and a 

 consequent continuance of the same tentative ex- 

 pectancy. This expectancy, however, waits for 

 renewed verification, and refrains from committing 

 itself unreservedly to the absolute invariability of 

 the law to which it refers. Unconditional universal- 

 ity of its ascertained conjunctions, natural science, 

 in its own sphere and function, neither claims nor 

 admits ; and a fortiori not their necessity.^ 



Now, to a science which accepts the testimony of 

 experience with this undoubting and instinctive 

 confidence that never stops to inquire what the real 

 grounds of the possibility of experience itself may 



* The account here given of scientific method may appear to some 

 readers different from that presented in the essay on "The Limits of 

 Evolution" (see pp. 33-36). There is no real inconsistency between the 

 two, however. Here, I am stating the method of science strictly as 

 such — stating it as the scientific expert uses it and states it to himself. 

 In the former place, I was stating the philosophy of the method — bring- 

 ing out its real presuppositions. I was representing the method, not 

 simply with reference to its practical objects, not purely as a means to 

 a result in science, but as a step in the theory of knowledge, a link in the 

 chain not of science but of philosophy. Nor does the above-mentioned 

 holding-back of science from necessity in its judgments mean anything 

 but its just recognition of tlie unavoidable insecurity of its basis of fact. 



