172 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC 



cipation of the working classes/' concludes 

 Dietzgen, "requires that they should lay hold 

 on the science of the century.'' 



Lester F. Ward, whose theories we shall 

 now examine, warns us against the erroneous 

 supposition "formerly quite prevalent," that 

 "science consists in the discovery of facts." 

 He maintains that "there is not a single sci- 

 ence of which this is true, and a much more 

 nearly correct definition would be that science 

 consists in reasoning about facts." 



We may recall here that learned body which 

 sneered at Darwin as "a mere theorizer" and 

 conferred its honors upon an unknown man 

 who had collected some facts about butter- 

 flies but had carefully avoided "reasoning 

 about them." Of course the value of this rea- 

 soning is that it leads to the discovery of those 

 laws or generalizations which reveal the rela- 

 tion of the facts to each other, and thus en- 

 ables us to appreciate their real significance. 



Therefore we might venture to push the 

 matter a little further and define science as 

 the discovery of laws. But for the uniformity 

 and invariability of physical phenomena, as- 

 tronomy would be impossible. The discovery 

 of evolution laid the foundations of modern 

 biology. Dalton's theory of atoms and Lavoi- 

 sier's permanence of matter emancipated 



