22 MODERN SCIENCE : 



possibly was exact in form, but to which it has never given and never can 

 give any meaning. ' 



Similarly with other generalities of Science: the "law" of the Con- 

 servation of Energy, the "law " of the Survival of the Fittest the more you 

 think about them the less possible is it to give any really intelligible sense 

 to them. The very word Fittest really begs the question which is under 

 consideration, and the whole Conservation law is merely an attenuation 

 of the already much attenuated "law" of Gravitation. The Chemical 

 Elements themselves are nothing but the projection on the external world 

 of concepts consisting of three or four attributes each : they are not more 

 real, but very much less real than the individual objects which they are 

 supposed to account for ; and their "elementary" character is merely 

 fictional. It probably is in fact as absurd to speak of pure carbon or pure 

 gold, as of a pure monkey or a pure dog. There are no such things, ex- 

 cept as they may be arrived at by arbitrary definition and the method of 

 ignorance. 



In the search for exactness then Science has been continually led on to 

 discard the human and personal elements in phenomena, in the hope of 

 finding some residuum as it were behind them which should not be per- 

 sonal and human but absolute and invariable. And the tendency has 

 been (hitherto) in all the science to get rid of such terms as blue, red, 

 light, heavy, hot, cold, concord, discord, health, vitality, right, wrong, 

 &c., and to rely on any less human elements discoverable in each case ; 

 as for instance in Sound, to deal less and less with the judgments and 

 sensations of the ear, and to rely more and more on measurements of lengths 

 of strings, numbers of vibrations, &c. Each science has been (as far as 

 possible) reduced to its lowest terms. Ethics has been made a question of 

 utility and inherited experience. Political Economy has been exhausted 

 of all conceptions of justice between man and man, of charity, affection, 

 and the instinct of solidarity ; and has been founded on its lowest dis- 

 coverable factor, namely self-interest. Biology has been denuded of the 

 force of personality in plants, animals, and men ; the "self" here has 

 been set aside, and the attempt made to reduce the science to a question 

 of chemical and cellular affinities, protoplasm, and the laws of osmose. 

 Chemical affinities, again, and all the wonderful phenomena of Physics 

 are emptied down into a flight of atoms ; and the flight of atoms (and of 

 astronomic orbs as well) is reduced to the laws of dynamics which the 

 student sitting in his chamber may write down on a piece of paper. Thus 

 the idea, formulated by Comte, of a great scale of sciences arising from 



1 I am not, of course, here arguing against the use of thermometers or other instruments 

 for practical purposes. This is a (perhaps the} legitimate field of Science. But as in the 

 case of prediction before mentioned, the exactness of certain practical results obtained is 

 a very different matter from the truth of the generalities which are supposed to underlie 

 these results. In using a thermometer you need not even mention the word " tempera 

 ture." 



