The Scientific Method. 335 



counting-liouse or the store, good morals, good citizenship, 

 good character cannot be depended upon. The co-operative 

 idea, when divested of its socialistic tendencies, is certainly 

 worthy of encouragement and should be constantly applied 

 to industrial life. This would involve, in addition to what- 

 I have before suggested, some system of profit-sharing, and 

 above all a greater permanence and certainty of tenure in 

 employment, so that the laborer be not regarded as a 

 machine but as a person, be provided for in case of sickness, 

 and be not subject to dismissal on a day's notice, irrespec- 

 tive of faithful service, at the supposed interest or maybe 

 the whim of an employer. Beyond this, when we come to 

 the relations of those more nearly equal in business life, if 

 we cannot have sympathy it is surely not too much to 

 expect honesty (which in these days seems to be going out of 

 fashion), and a state of morals wherein a lie is not con- 

 sidered, as it has been styled, "an intellectual mode of 

 meeting a difficulty." 



The third and last suggestion I have to offer is another 

 caution. It is said that "Knowledge is power," thereby 

 implying that it is not itself the ultimate end of human 

 life, but is of value because it gives a wider field and a 

 greater effectiveness to action. The strongest desires and 

 aspirations are satisfied only in an activity which is forever 

 creating. Knowledge, indeed, is often an end in itself, 

 because learning is a process of activity which selects and 

 forms new objects, not before present, to the mind ; but it 

 is only under the stimulus of ideals which by contrast 

 produce a felt insufficiency of present conditions, a dissat- 

 isfaction with what is, that the process of self-development 

 goes on to its fullest consummation. This creative instinct 

 must be exercised, or it will become atrophied, and then 

 growth ceases and decadence begins. We must therefore 

 consider that, good as science is, it is in the art-impulse and 

 its products that we behold, after all, the source and the end 

 of individual and social progress. It is in the unknown, 

 which furnishes possibilities of knowing, the unachieved 

 which presents possibilities of achievement, that we find 

 the moving cause of our exertion to know and to do. It is 

 necessary to ascertain what is, and see things as they are j 

 but if we become accustomed to the thought that scientific 

 observation and experiment iipon phenomena presented is 

 the only worthy object of mental activity, we sliall be in 



