76 THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE 



sions. Nature is in the witness-box and experiment 

 is the interrogating counsel. Provided the counsel is 

 skilful and Nature communicative, the jury honest, 

 receptive and free from preconceived opinion, the 

 decision is true not merely to the canons of human 

 reasoning-, but true also to external reality. The 

 verdicts of the humanistic and scientific philosophies 

 differ from one another, as the rule rather than the 

 exception, as much as did the Pythagorean and 

 Copernican solar systems, when external reality is 

 involved, and, after all, how often is it not? Just 

 so far as the raw material is not concerned with man 

 at all, directly, and in direct ratio to the extent that 

 it is not concerned with life at all, other than the 

 purely mechanistic and physico-chemical aspect of 

 the vital process, a new world opens out independent 

 of and hardly dreamt of by the older philosophy. 



Mr A. J. Balfour, in his Glasgow Gifford lectures, 

 has done good service by pointing out how, time and 

 again, in the science of the inanimate universe, 

 among some of the more fundamental theories, that 

 particular theory which, as the subsequent history of 

 science has shown, is destined to survive, has appealed 

 irresistibly, and in the teeth of apparent evidence to 

 the contrary, to the human mind as correct, genera- 

 tions or centuries before anything like a rigid or even 

 satisfying proof was forthcoming. It is to be hoped 

 that this may do something to stimulate interest 

 among scientific men in a subject which has been 

 distasteful ever since Bishop Berkeley made the 

 impressive discovery that if you do not put the 

 world of external reality to begin with into the 

 mental mill, you may go on turning it for ever 

 without it coming out. 



In certain spheres, which daily and hourly 

 are enlarging themselves to embrace more and 

 more of our daily life, and to be fraught with 



