92 SCEPTICISM. 



What Is meant by saying that knowledge works in 

 practice ? Is it enough that we should be able to 

 work out from our theoretic assumptions isolated 

 results which hold good in practice ? Are the 

 fundamental principles of life and knowledge justi- 

 fied by their application tO' isolated cases ? Shall 

 we stay to praise the correctness of the minor details 

 of a picture, if its whole plan is preposterous, and 

 its whole conception is perverse ? Surely that is 

 not enough: if knowledge is to be justified by its 

 practical success, it must be because its success is 

 complete, because it succeeds in producing a complete 

 harmony in the practical sphere. For else It may 

 be merely an elaborate fraud, designed to lead us by 

 an arduous and round-about way to the inevitable 

 conclusion, that the nature of things is ultimately 

 inexplicable. 'Our knowledge works '^ — what won- 

 der if it works ? For w^here would be the mischief if 

 it did not work ? If It did not work, we should not 

 worry. If, arguing falsely from false premisses to 

 vicious conclusions, these did not, by some malicious 

 mockery of a primordial perversity of things, partly 

 correspond to the processes of nature, how should 

 we be deceived? What If the light of science be 

 but a baleful will-of-the-wisp which involves us ever 

 deeper In the marshes of nescience ? How should 

 we be lured into the fruitless toil of science, if it did 

 not hold out to us a delusive hope of reducing into 

 a cosmos of knowledge the chaos of our present- 

 ations, if we saw at the outset what with much labour 

 we perceive at the end, that our knowledge always 

 leaves us with an irrationar remainder of final in- 

 expllcablllty ? 



In order to rebut the suggestion that the apparent 

 practical success of knowledge is one more Illusion, 



