A CRITICISM. 23 



the simplest to the complex, has tacitly underlain modern scientific work. 

 It Science has sought to " explain" each stage by reference to a lower 



stage "blueness" by vibrations, and vibrations by flying atoms the 



human always by the sub-human. Going out from humanity dissatisfied, 

 it has wandered through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, through the 

 regions of Chemistry and Physics, into that of Mechanics. "Here at 

 last, in Mechanics, is something outside humanity, something exact in 

 itself, something substantial," it has said. " Let us build again on this 

 as on a foundation, and in time we shall find out what humanity is." 

 This I say has been the dream of Modern Science ; yet the fallacy of it is 

 obvious. We have not got outside the human, but only to the outer- 

 most verge of it. Mass and motion, which in this process are taken to be 

 real entities and the first progenitors of all phenomena, are simply the 

 last abstractions of sensible experience, and our emptiest concepts. The 

 material explanation of the universe is simply an attempt to account for 

 phenomena by those attributes which appear to us to be common to them 

 all which is, as said before, like accounting for men by their boots ; it 

 may be possible to get an exact formula this way, but its contents have 

 little or no meaning. 



The whole process of Science and the Comtian classification of its 

 branches regarded thus as an attempt to explain Man by Mechanics is 

 a huge vicious circle. It professes to start with something simple, exact, 

 and invariable, and from this point to mount step by step till it comes to 

 Man himself; but indeed it starts with Man. It plants itself on sensations 

 low down (mass, motion, &c.), and endeavors by means of them to ex- 

 plain sensations high up, which reminds one of nothing so much as that 

 process vulgarly described as "climbing up a ladder to comb your hair." 

 In truth Science has never left the great world, or cosmos, of Man, nor 

 ever really found a locus standi without it ; but during the last two or three 

 centuries it has gone in this direction, outwards, continually. Leaving the 

 central basis and facts of humanity as too vast and unmanageable, and 

 also as apparently variable from man to man and therefore affording no 

 certain consent to work upon, it has wandered gradually outwards, seek- 

 ing something of more definite and universal application. Discarding 

 thus one by one the interior phases of sensation as the sense of personal 

 relationship, the sense of justice, duty, fitness in things or what-not (as 

 too uncertain, or perhaps developed to an unequal degree in different 

 persons, embryonic in one and matured in another), drifting past the 

 more specialised bodily senses, of color, sound, taste, smell, &c. , as for 

 similar reasons unavailable Science at last in the primitive consciousness 

 of muscular contraction and its abstraction "mass" or "matter" comes 

 to a pause. Here in this last sense, common probably to man and to the 

 lowest animals, it finds its widest, most universal ground its farthest 

 limit from the Centre. It has reached the outermost shell, as it were, of 

 the great Mancosmos. Even this shell is partially human ; it is not en- 



