LII PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
It is the mission of science to bring the physics of the world into 
unity by reading the phenomena of the world in the dry light of 
reason, and by continuing to spell and parse the hieroglyphs of 
Nature until the rational processes of our logic are brought into 
demonstrated correspondence with the actual processes of Nature. 
Science still keeps metaphysic in her service. But instead of 
weaving whole fabrics from the metaphysical loom and devising 
ingenious tissues which only reveal the nakedness of reason, Science 
in passing from the known to the unknown employs metaphysic 
as the gossamer spider employs the single thread on which she 
sways and balances her movements between two solid points. The 
thread is tied to something solid as the condition of reaching some- 
thing solid after her aerial flight. So the man of science, work- 
ing in and under the limitations of physics, works on the lines 
of metaphysic thought when he frames the tentative hypotheses 
with which he returns again to the patient, practical study of 
nature.* 
The scientific man reads the Universe backward by the inductive 
syllogism, because Nature has proceeded forward in her evolutions, 
according to an unbroken chain of antecedent causes. The physi- 
cal Universe is indeed a fasciculus of natural syllogisms colligated 
into the compactest unity, and so holding all things, forces, and 
functions under the bonds of logic. The scientific man, at any 
given stage of his enquiry, has before him only the conclusions or 
at best only the minor premises and the conclusions of this world- 
process. And he knows that these conclusions of the natural syllo- 
gistic process have been reached through a perpetual flux in the 
universal complex of things, forces, and functions—a flux which 
dates from the beginning of star-mist and nebula, or from the 
beginning of that more elementary fluid out of which star-mist and 
nebula were generated, according to the scientific metaphysic of the 
present day. Is it any wonder, then, that many of the major 
premises of Nature’s physical syllogisms should still be wrapt in 
impenetrable mystery to us, as many of the major premises which 
* Bacon’s oft-quoted contrast between metaphysicians, who, he says, spin 
‘‘Jaborious cobwebs of learning,’’ like spiders, and physical philosophers, 
who ‘work according to the stuff, and are limited thereby,”’ seems hardly fair 
to the spider. Advancement of Learning, Book J, iv, 5. 
