MODERN SCIENCE 



A CRITICISM. 



Xoyco XoyoS i'tioS 



IT is one of the difficulties which meet anyone who suggests that modern 

 science is not wholly satisfactory, that it is immediately assumed that 

 the writer is covertly defending what Ingersoll calls the "rib-story," or 

 that he wishes to restore belief in the literal inspiration of the Bible. But, 

 religious controversy apart, and while admitting that Science has done a 

 great work in cleaning away the kitchen-middens of superstition and 

 opening the path to clearer and saner views of the world, it is possible 

 and there is already a growing feeling that way that her positive con- 

 tributions to our comprehension of the order of the universe have in late 

 times been disappointing, and that even her methods are at fault and 

 must lead to failure. After a glorious burst of perhaps fifty years, amid 

 great acclamations and good hopes that the crafty old universe was going 

 to be caught in her careful net, Science, it must be confessed, now finds 

 herself in almost every direction in the most hopeless quandaries ; and, 

 whether the rib-story be true or not, has at any rate provided no very 

 satisfactory substitute for it. And the reason of this failure is very obvious. 

 It goes with a certain defect in the human mind, which, necessarily 

 belongs to the Civilisation-period the tendency, namely, to separate the 

 logical and intellectual part of man from the emotional and instinctive, 

 and to give it a locus standi of its own. Science has failed because she has 

 attempted to carry out the investigation of nature from the intellectual side 

 alone neglecting the other constituents necessarily involved in the pro- 

 blem. She has failed because she has attempted an impossible task ; for 

 the discovery of a permanently valid and purely intellectual representa- 

 tion of the universe is simply impossible. Such a thing does not exist. 



The various theories and views of nature which we hold are merely the 

 fugitive envelopes of the successive stages of human growth each set of 

 theories and views belonging organically to the moral and emotional stage 

 which has been reached, and being in some sort the expression of it ; so 

 that the attempt at any given time to set up an explanation of phenomena 



