THE UNITY OF SCIENCE 27 



tendency that has been especially noticeable in contemporary 

 French thought and has received perhaps its most emphatic 

 and extreme expression in a French book published recently 

 (1909). The representatives of this view, which may be 

 called scientific pluralism, insist that the world of experience 

 is full of sheer gaps, of disconnected brute facts, incapable of 

 explanation, of deduction from any ultimate common laws, of 

 treatment by any intellectual process whatever beyond those 

 of mere recognition and comparison. The recent book to 

 which I have referred 5 is designated by its sub-title as "an 

 essay on the discontinuity and heterogeneity of phenomena." 

 The doctrine which I have called logical pluralism, says its 

 author, "suppresses all hope of a unified knowledge of the 

 universe, even within vague limits. It defines science as a 

 collection of facts, inevitably fragmentary, inevitably petty; 

 it makes us recognize, even in the loftiest syntheses, merely 

 weak groups of analogies." To such a doctrine, he predicts, 

 "will more and more incline those minds that accept modestly 

 the teaching of facts and are resigned to having only those 

 syntheses which are furnished by observation and experi- 

 ence." "During the century just past the partisans of plural- 

 ity have cut no great figure in philosophy .... Most often their 

 views have been confused with those of monists or dualists; 

 ill defined, they have often, also, been of an antiquated sort, 

 and have not taken account of scientific discoveries. In short, 

 pluralism in the nineteenth century had only a subsidiary posi- 

 tion, a waiting role. But there are signs that it will soon have 

 its revenge. The sense of the diversity of things increases in 

 proportion to the contemporary increase of scientific knowl- 

 edge and to a growing subtlety in the interpretation of earlier 

 discoveries. Men of science and philosophers more and more 

 realize that all formulas are but approximations; calculation 

 as it is applied to the measurement of phenomena calls for a 

 constantly increasing flexibility in formulas, constantly de- 



5 Le Pluralisme, by J. H. Boex-Borel (J. H. Rosny aine). 



