76 The Higher Usefulness of Science 



comparatively and in the rough, the intellect that 

 would be capable of predicting the British fauna of 

 1869 from the cosmic vapor out of which the world 

 is supposed to have been produced, would be one en- 

 dowed with genuine clairvoyant powers; one capable 

 of foreseeing independently of the mechanism and ex- 

 periences requisite to all ordinary foresight. In a 

 strict sense prediction of what will occur in nature is 

 wholly conditioned upon knowledge of what has oc- 

 curred, and consequently an intellect so endowed that 

 it could predict the present world before ever any 

 such world had existed, would be one so endowed that 

 it could interpret natural phenomena without any 

 experiential knowledge of such phenomena a result 

 exactly antithetic to what Huxley's whole practical 

 life and teaching stood for. 



It is now high time to see how the various arguments, 

 scattered, somewhat bunglingly and obscurely, along 

 the road over which we have come, stand us in hand 

 toward the fulfillment of our main task, that of show- 

 ing that science has moral obligations and is able of 

 her own strength to meet them. If the two proposi- 

 tions be accepted that we have absolutely no way of 

 knowing what nature is capable of producing except- 

 ing from what she actually has produced; and that 

 she is seen to be self-sufficient for the production of all 

 we actually find in her providing we recognize a suffi- 

 ciently wide range and large number of factors as 

 operative in the generative processes, then, obviously, 



