SECTION 1. ABSOLUTISM AND RELATIVISM IN METHODOLOGY. 21 



gations will possess a general power of analysis and synthesis, 

 a general capacity of bringing to light what is concealed and 

 correctly extracting the variety of implications of a fact or 

 a statement, which has heretofore only existed among distin- 

 guished men of science when they dealt with particular prob- 

 lems familiar to them. Unfortunately, the subject of the 

 education of man is too gigantic to be approached within the 

 narrow limits of this treatise, and we have therefore largely 

 restricted ourselves to an analysis of the mental process em- 

 ployed in scientific discovery. 



We may, however, add that the primitive chaotic conception 

 of the world, as pictured by the fetichist and afterwards by 

 the polytheist, and even by a Lucretius, is being more and 

 more reduced to order by science as witness the gravitational 

 and astronomical conception of the Universe; the geological, 

 meteorological, geographical, cartographical, racial, and political 

 conception of the earth; our knowledge of the atmosphere, its 

 constituents, and its movements; the general facts of inorganic 

 and organic chemistry; the theories of the evolution of worlds 

 and of living forms; the insight gained into the static and 

 dynamic nature of the cell; the ascertained anatomy and physio- 

 logy of the members of the vegetable and animal kingdoms; 

 the knowledge of man's story and nature gained through archeo- 

 logy and scientific history ; the tolerable comprehension of the 

 furniture of man's mind and the stages of his life; the wonderful 

 instruments which are at the disposal of captains of industry 

 and men of science; the enlightenment traceable to the aid 

 rendered by mathematics and geometry and the systematisation 

 of sense knowledge; the internationalisation of ethical, political, 

 economic, and scientific methods; the development of universal 

 rules of conduct; and the spread of taste and of refinement and 

 that, with the ages, it will become increasingly easy to grasp 

 and comprehend the world of facts. Thus in time the main 

 forces and uniformities in nature will be discovered and syste- 

 matised, and man's outer and inner life more or less completely 

 understood and ordered. Hence absolutist doctrines and de- 

 ductive methods of a severely mathematical character will, in 

 the course of time, become more and more applicable, until, 

 on the advent of the mythic stage, when the world formula 

 has been evolved and the ultra-microscopic and ultra-telescopic 

 facts of nature have been revealed in their pristine simplicity 

 and hammered together into a series of facts or into one fact 

 by inter-planetary co-operation, Descartes' fascinating dream 

 of intuitively apprehending the Universe will be actualised. On 

 the present age rests the humbler and more prosaic task of 

 promoting a general comprehension of the mental processes 

 involved in the best contemporary scientific practice, and of 

 urging the reasoned application of the fruits of such an endeavour 

 to all spheres of possible investigation and activity. An abso- 



