32 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



valuable in humility and what is fruitful in the scientific 

 temper. 



Human beings cannot, of course, wholly transcend 

 human nature ; something subjective, if only the interest 

 that determines the direction of our attention, must 

 remain in all our thought. But scientific philosophy 

 comes nearer to objecti\dty than any other human 

 pursuit, and gives us, therefore, the closest constant and 

 the most intimate relation with the outer world that it is 

 possible to achieve. To the primitive mind, everything 

 is either friendly or hostile ; but experience has shown 

 that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by 

 which the world is to be understood. Scientific philo- 

 sophy thus represents, though as yet only in a nascent 

 condition, a higher form of thought than any pre-scientific 

 belief or imagination, and, like every approach to self- 

 transcendence, it brings with it a rich reward in increase 

 of scope and breadth and comprehension. Evolutionism,^ 

 in spite of its appeals to particular scientific facts, fails to 

 be a truly scientific philosophy because of its slavery to 

 time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant 

 interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly 

 scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piece- 

 meal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward 

 mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent 

 to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without 

 the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary 

 demands. 



