ADDRESS. 15 



On the other hand, it is impossible to deny that, if the mere entry on 

 the search for the concealed causes of physical phenomena is not a tres- 

 pass on ground we have no right to explore, it is at all events the 

 beginning of a dangerous journey. 



The wraiths of phlogiston, caloi'ic, luminiferous corpuscles, and a 

 crowd of other phantoms haunt the investigator, and as the grim host 

 vanishes into nothingness he cannot but wonder if his own conceptions of 

 atoms and of the ether 



' shall dissolve, 



And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 



Leave not a wrack behind.' 



But though science, like Bunyan's hero, has sometimes had to pass 

 through the 'Valley of Humiliation,' the spectres which meet it there 

 are not formidable if they are boldly faced. The facts that mistakes 

 have been made, that theories have been propounded, and for a time 

 accepted, which later investigations have disproved, do not necessarily 

 discredit the method adopted. In scientific theories, as in the world 

 around us, there is a survival of the fittest, and Dr. James Ward's 

 unsympathetic account of the blundei's of those whose work has shed 

 glory on the nineteenth century, might mutatis mutandis stand for a 

 description of the history of the advance of civilisation. ' The story of 

 the progress so far,' he tells us, ' is briefly this : Divergence between 

 theory and fact one part of the way, the wreckage of abandoned fictions 

 for the rest, with an unattainable goal of phenomenal nihilism and ultra- 

 physical mechanism beyond.' ' 



' The path of progress,' says Professor Karl Pearson, ' is strewn with 

 the wreck of nations. Traces are everywhere to be seen of the hecatombs 

 of inferior races, and of victims who found not the narrow way to the 

 greater perfection. Yet these dead peoples are, in very truth, the step- 

 ping-stones on which mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and 

 deeper emotional life of to-day.' - 



It is only necessai-y to add that the progress of society is directed 

 towards an unattainable goal of universal contentment, to make the 

 parallel complete. 



And so, in the one case as in the other, we may leave ' the dead to 

 bury their dead.' The question before us is not whether we too may not 

 be trusting to false ideas, erroneous experiments, evanescent theories. 

 No doubt we are ; but, without making an insolent claim to be better 

 than our fathers, we may fairly contend that, amid much that is uncertain 

 and temporary, some of the fundamental conceptions, some of the root- 

 ideas of sciencej are so grounded on reason and fact that we cannot 

 but regai'd them as an aspect of the very truth. 



Enough has, perhaps, now been said on this point for my immediate 



> James Ward, Ilatiwalism atid Agnosticism, vol. i. p. 153. 



2 Karl Pearson National Life from the Standpoint of Science, p. 62. 



