270 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



complex scheme agrees with facts, i.e. with new sense- 

 impressions, is a matter of experiment again. 



The universality of natural law may, says Pearson, 

 really be relative to the human minds involved, 

 which, like machines that work for no coin but a 

 penny, may sort out and analyse, all in practically 

 the same manner, the material they will alone accept. 

 This return to the doctrine of Kant " the Ego pre- 

 scribes its own laws to nature " would avoid the 

 assumption that these routines of sense-impressions, 

 these relations between mental concepts, are produced 

 by the unknowable, whether the unknowable take the 

 form of matter, the thing-in-itself of the materialist, 

 or the form of an immediate action of the Deity, 

 the idealist reality of Bishop Berkeley. 



Thus, to these empiricists, " science refusing to 

 infer wildly where it cannot know, and unwilling to 

 assume new causes where the old have not yet been 

 shown insufficient treats the ' dead matter ' of the 

 materialist," the mind-stuff of the idealist metaphysi- 

 cian, the immanent Deity of the natural theologian, 

 " as a world of sense-impressions; . . . the scientist 

 . . . recognizes that the so-called law of nature is 

 but a simple rhume, a brief description of a wide 

 range of his own perceptions, and that the harmony 

 between his perceptive and reasoning faculties is not 

 incapable of being traced to its origin. . . . Our 

 groups of perceptions form for us reality, and the 

 results of our reasoning on these perceptions and the 

 conceptions deduced from them form our only genuine 

 knowledge." 



On these lines the different sciences into which, for 

 convenience, our studies are divided are but different 



