32 2 The Theory of Genetic Modes 



§ 8. The Axioms of Genetic Science 



A survey of the sciences, according to the great di- 

 visions which are to-day current, serves to show that 

 certain of the distinctions now suggested are fairly well 

 recognized; but the most irreconcilable differences as to 

 province, method, and preferential claim spring up about 

 the lines of division, through the need of a principle 

 which shall estabUsh more exact boundaries. The gen- 

 eral hierarchy of the sciences, starting with physics and 

 chemistry, and passing up through the natural or biologi- 

 cal, into the mental, and finally into the moral sciences, — 

 this is well established. But we find the claim made, in 

 conformity to the theory discussed on an earlier page, 

 under the term * agenetic science,' that the true method 

 of science, and its one ideal, is the reduction of the com- 

 plex phenomena of each of the higher, in turn, into state- 

 ments of laws which hold for the lower, until we finally 

 reach formulas which actually state all knowledge in the 

 terms of the quantitative measurements of the physical 

 and mathematical sciences. 



Against such a demand and the scientific ideal which 

 it erects, philosophical thinkers in certain branches of re- 

 search have been in continual protest. And if what we 

 have aimed to make out in our earlier pages be true, then 

 this protest may be put in the form of a general distinc- 

 tion. The distinction holds as between each of the sci- 

 ences and the one which lies below — the one upon which 

 it depends in the way indicated by the term 'nomic.'^ 



We are able to say that what has been overlooked in 

 each case, in the attempt to reduce a given sort of phe- 



1 Above, Chap. I. § 2. 



