42 REPORT—1904. 
the problem involved in the attempt to extract knowledge from experi- 
ence, they seem scarcely to have understood that there was any such 
problem to be solved. Led astray by a misconception to which I have 
already referred ; believing that science was concerned only with (so-called) 
‘phenomena,’ that it had done all that it could be asked to do if it 
accounted for the sequence of our individual sensations, that it was con- 
cerned only with the ‘laws of Nature,’ and not with the inner character 
of physical reality ; disbelieving, indeed, that any such physical reality 
does in truth exist ;—it has never felt called upon seriously to consider 
what are the actual methods by which science attains its results, and how 
those methods are to be justified. If anyone, for example, will take up 
Mill’s logic, with its ‘sequences and co-existences between phenomena,’ 
its ‘method of difference,’ its ‘method of agreement,’ and the rest ; if he 
will then compare the actual doctrines of science with this version of the 
mode in which those doctrines have been arrived at, he will soon be 
convinced of the exceedingly thin intellectual fare which has so often been 
served out to us under the imposing title of Inductive Theory. 
There is an added emphasis given to these reflections by a train of 
thought which has long interested me, though I acknowledge that it never 
seems to have interested anyone else. Observe, then, that in order of 
logic sense-perceptions supply the premisses from which we draw all our 
knowledge of the physical world. It is they which tell us there is a 
physical world ; it is on their authority that we learn its character. But 
in order of causation they are effects due (in part) to the constitution of our 
organs of sense. What we see depends not merely on what there is to be 
seen, but on our eyes. What we hear depends not merely on what there 
is to hear, but on our ears. Now, eyes and ears, and all the mechanism 
of perception, have, according to accepted views, been evolved in us and 
our brute progenitors by the slow operation of Natural Selection. And 
what is true of sense-perception is of course also true of the intellectual 
powers which enable us to erect upon the frail and narrow platform which 
sense-perception provides, the proud fabric of the sciences. 
Now Natural Selection only works through utility. It encourages 
aptitudes useful to their possessor or his species in the struggle for 
existence, and, for a similar reason, it is apt to discourage useless apti- 
tudes, however interesting they may be from other points of view, because, 
being useless, they are probably burdensome. 
But it is certain that our powers of sense-perception and of calcula- 
tion were fully developed ages before they were effectively employed in 
searching out the secrets of physical reality—for our discoveries in this 
field are the triumphs but of yesterday. The blind forces of Natural 
Selection which so admirably simulate design when they are providing 
for a present need, possess no power of prevision, and could never, 
except by accident, have endowed mankind, while in the making, with a 
physiological or mental outfit adapted to the higher physical investigations, 
