RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 55 



use these words. We are used to the word 

 rationalism in religious discussions, and there we 

 attach to it, as does Lecky in his History of 

 Rationalism, a somewhat negative meaning. We 

 think it implies the denial of old-fashioned ortho- 

 doxy, and greater reliance on reason and common 

 sense. I do not propose to use the word in this 

 somewhat narrow acceptation. Again, the word 

 science is in this country applied almost exclu- 

 sively to the knowledge of the phenomena of the 

 material world, physics, chemistry, biology. But 

 this is an abusive use of the term. For science 

 can be nothing but orderly knowledge, and 

 orderly knowledge is just as possible in such 

 studies as philology and archaeology and history 

 as in those dealing with the physical world. In 

 all the great academies of Europe it is fully recog- 

 nised that science has two great branches, one of 

 which deals with the visible world, the other with 

 man, his faculties and his history. 



The question which I propose to discuss is the 

 parts belonging respectively to rationalism and 

 to science in modern civilisation and progress. 

 And I beg to be allowed to mean by rationalism 

 the adoption of certain fixed principles from which 

 the course of our action may be deduced or argued 

 out; and by science I would mean the regular 

 and methodic knowledge of man, in the past and 

 the present ; the investigation not of ethical prin- 

 ciples but of consequences, of events, and of the 

 results of action. But I must explain. 



