THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE: 



A FORECAST. 



Once let that [the human ideal] slip out of the thought, and science is of no more use 

 than the invocations in the Egyptian papiri. RICHARD JEFFERIES. 



IT would appear then, from the preceding paper, that in some sense a 

 mistake has been made in the method of modern scientific work ; not 

 that the vast amount of labor expended in it has been altogether wasted, 

 for in return for this there is a mass of practical results and detailed ob- 

 servations to show ; but that in attempting to solve the problem of science 

 by the intellect alone, a radical mistake has been made which could only 

 land us in absurdity, and that this mistake has for the time being also 

 vitiated the results that have been attained. For in reference to this 

 last point the divorce of the intellectual from the emotional has caused 

 a great portion of our scientific observations to become merely pedantic 

 and trifling ; while it has turned the practical results as industrial and 

 military machinery, &c. into engines of evil as often as into engines of 

 good. 



Science in searching for a permanently valid and purely intellectual 

 representation of the universe has, as already said, been searching for a 

 thing which does not exist. The very facts of Nature, as we call them, 

 are at least half feeling. If we try to clean the feeling out of a fact and 

 to produce a statement which shall be devoid of the human or sense ele- 

 ment, it simply amounts to cleaning the meaning out ; and though our 

 resulting statement may be exact it is nugatory and of no value. We 

 might as well try to take the clay out of a brick. It must never be for- 

 gotten that the logical processes important as they are cannot stand by 

 themselves, have no standing ground of their own. They presuppose 

 assumptions and are the expression of things that are unreasoning, perhaps 

 illogical. The strictest logic is a mere hooking together of links in a 

 chain, and the last link is of no use you can put no stress on it unless 

 the first is secured somewhere. The strength of the intellectual, chain is 

 no greater than that of the staple from which it hangs and that is a 

 human feeling. The strength of Euclid is no greater than that of the 

 axioms and they are feelings ; they are unreasoning statements of which 



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