396 DARWINISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE 



it happen that after forming higher and higher concepts, 

 depicting less and less of the things comprised, suddenly, 

 when the whole thought-process was over, the " ultimate 

 things " once more contained the complete reality ? 

 When man began and continued to form concepts, he 

 regarded the world from which he started as the sole 

 reality ; he by no means sought after a "metaphysical," 

 true reality. It would be a piece of good fortune that 

 we would have to put down to magic if at the 

 conclusion of his process of thought the final result 

 represented the true and different and hitherto unimagined 

 reality. 



No, it is incredible. We must assume that science, 

 which ever presses on, and must press on, towards 

 greater simplicity, and so is always analysing bodies 

 afresh without ever coming to an end, imagines the 

 process of division to be complete. In that case we 

 need not assume that in the continued disintegration of 

 bodies we shall come at length to parts that are not 

 bodies. We shall then see that the ether-particles were 

 created by the human understanding, because it needed 

 them in its effort to understand nature. 



Physical science is described as empirical, and the 

 designation is correct. But we must not on that account 

 suppose that science never goes beyond the range of 

 experience. It deals with probabilities as well as exact 

 observations. When it deduces a "law" from a 

 number of phenomena that it has observed, it assumes 

 that this law will hold also for other phenomena of the 

 same category ; and this assumption in turn implies 



