THE UNFATHOMED UNIVERSE 37 



save those called scientific, but there has been perfect open- 

 ness in the retreat from the position of world-interpretation. 

 No longer should it be possible to ask, as the title of a not 

 very ancient book does, " God or Natural Selection ? ", for 

 that is opposing an interpretative concept to a descriptive 

 formula, in short, trying to talk two languages at once. 



The third hopeful sign, as it seems to an outsider, is a 

 change on the part of Philosophy in its relations with Science. 

 There is a growing recognition that Philosophy must use in 

 her characteristically interpretative reconstruction all the gen- 

 eral results of the sciences. The Procrustean attempt to force 

 the facts of Nature to fit a premeditated abstract intellectual 

 scheme is not more promising than the antipodal attempt 

 to wring a philosophical system out of Nature alone. The 

 reaction of Lotze from Schelling may serve as a diagrammatic 

 illustration of what is now taking place in our midst ; that 

 philosophy is using the best that science can give, and is 

 systematising that along with the other winnings of the de- 

 veloping human spirit. 



Prof. A. E. Taylor gives (1909, p. 192) a luminous 

 statement of the relation between science and philosophy : 



" The work of the Philosophy of Nature and of Mind only begins 

 where that of the experimental sciences leaves off. Its data are not 

 particular facts, as directly amassed by experiment and observation, 

 but the hypotheses used by experimental science for the co-ordina- 

 tion and description of these facts. And it examines these hypoth- 

 eses, not with the object of modifying their structure so as to in- 

 clude new facts, or to include the old facts in a simpler form, but 

 purely for the purpose of estimating their value as an account of 

 ultimately real existence. Whether the hypotheses are adequate as 

 implements for the calculation of natural processes is a question 

 which Philosophy, when it understands its place, leaves entirely 

 to the special sciences; whether they can claim to be more than 

 useful formulae for calculation, i.e., whether they give us knowledge 



