276 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



are realities. Electric current and electromotive 

 force may be purely conceptual quantities, but the 

 proportionality between them probably corresponds 

 to some real property of that external world about 

 which pure science may tell us nothing, but in which 

 metaphysical insight insists on belief, and to which 

 it calls science to witness in an alien court. 



Many, too, would say that the fact that the human 

 mind finds reason in nature is not purely because it is 

 looking at itself projected there, not purely because, 

 itself being reasonable, it sorts out and classifies only 

 those relations in which it can find its own reason 

 reflected. A human mind can conceive of chaos ; 

 it can find chaos easily enough when it tackles a new 

 problem, and often leaves it in chaos at the last. Since 

 it finds reason and order in nature, then, it may fairly 

 conclude that nature itself is orderly, that perhaps 

 after all, in some faint way, natural law has points of 

 likeness to legal ordinance, and may denote a lawgiver. 

 This is not science, it is metaphysics once more calling 

 on science to witness. But metaphysically the argu- 

 ment has weight ; those who do not wish to see all 

 the wonders of creation concentrated in the human 

 mind may still hold, in the old realistic no less than in 

 the new conceptual sense, that " the heavens declare 

 the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his 

 handiwork." 



During part of the nineteenth century, the idealistic 

 philosophies of such men as Kant and Hegel stood in 

 sharp contrast with the confident naturalism of those 

 who, like Herbert Spencer, took the impress of the 

 dominant school of scientific thought, and carried it 

 over to metaphysics. 



