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easy kinds of scepticism, just as there are cheap and easy kinds of 
dogmatism; in fact scepticism can become viciously dogmatic, and 
science has to be as much on its guard against personal predilection in 
the negative as in the positive direction. An attitude of universal 
denial may be very superficial. 
‘To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally 
convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of 
reflection.’ 
All intellectual processes are based on abstraction. For instance, 
History must ignore a great multitude of facts in order to treat any 
intelligently: it selects. So does Art; and that is why a drawing is 
clearer than reality. Science makes a diagram of reality, displaying 
the works, like a skeleton clock. Anatomists dissect out the nervous 
system, the blood vessels, and the muscles, and depict them separately, 
—there must be discrimination for intellectual grasp,—but in life they 
are all merged and co-operating together; they do not really work 
separately, though they may be studied separately. A scalpel 
discriminates: a dagger or a bullet crashes through everything. That 
is life,—or rather death. The laws of natureare a diagrammatic frame- 
work, analysed or abstracted out of the full comprehensiveness of reality. 
Hence it is that Science has no authority in denials. To deny 
effectively needs much more comprehensive knowledge than to assert. 
And abstraction is essentially not comprehensive: one cannot have it 
both ways. Science employs the methods of abstraction and thereby 
makes its discoveries. 
The reason why some physiologists insist so strenuously on the 
validity and self-sufficiency of the laws of physics and chemistry, and 
resist the temptation to appeal to unknown causes—even though the 
guiding influence and spontaneity of living things are occasionally 
conspicuous as well as inexplicable—is that they are keen to do their 
proper work; and their proper work is to pursue the laws of ordinary 
physical Energy into the intricacies of ‘ colloidal electrolytic structures 
of great chemical complexity ’ and to study its behaviour there. 
What we have clearly to grasp, on their testimony, is that for all 
the terrestrial manifestations of life the ordinary physical and chemical 
processes have to serve. There are not new laws for living matter, and 
old laws for non-living; the laws are the same; or if ever they differ, 
the burden of proof rests on him who sustains the difference. The 
conservation of energy, the laws of chemical combination, the laws of 
electric currents, of radiation, etc., etc.,—all the laws of Chemistry and 
Physics,—may be applied without hesitation in the Organic domain. 
Whether they are sufficient is open to question, but as far as they go 
