February 21, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



285 



in itself. It hesitates, it stumbles and 

 makes mistakes and either confesses and 

 corrects or stubbornly adheres to them; 

 but it never despairs or is utterly con- 

 founded. The other reason is this: His- 

 tory shows that this confidence is more and 

 more, in fact, justifying itself. All prog- 

 ress in knowledge depends ultimately for 

 its justification on this self-confidence of 

 human reason; but all actual progress in 

 knowledge is a further justification, in fact, 

 of the confidence on which it depends. 

 Man has faith in himself to know ; in exer- 

 cise of this faith, he actually attains higher 

 and higher degrees of knowledge. While, 

 then, constant criticism, frequent scepti- 

 cism, much rather persistent agnosticism, 

 are attitudes of the human mind toward 

 reality, which should always characterize 

 the method of science; scornful criticism, 

 despairing scepticism, universal agnosti- 

 cism, are essentially antagonistic to the 

 true spirit and hopeful method of science. 

 And those who cherish such views of the 

 relativity of all knowledge aj-e dissenters 

 from the one form of faith which underlies 

 all particular forms of faith, intellectual, 

 social, religious. An ever present and es- 

 sential feature of man's rational being is 

 rational faith, or reason's own confidence 

 in itself as the organon of truth. 



While, then, each particular science has 

 its own special methods of procedure in 

 the discovery and testing of its own con- 

 ceptions and laws, there is a certain uni- 

 versal method; or, the rather, there are 

 certain general considerations touching a 

 universal method, which all must observe. 

 Three rules of method, confirmed by the 

 psychological and anthropological study of 

 man, provide for the patient, unprejudiced 

 use of perception, by way of self-conscious- 

 ness and through the sense, of the facts; 

 the consistent and controlled use of the 

 logical faculties in the interpretation and 

 explanation of these facts; and a justi- 



fiable faith in reason as opposed to the 

 positions of a despairing agnosticism. It 

 is not the ancient Sophistical or the mod- 

 ern pragmatic interpretation of the Pro- 

 tagorean maxim, Man is measure of all 

 things ; of that which is, how it is ; and of 

 that which is not, bow it is not, that can 

 guide us into the safe and fruitful method 

 to be pursued by the positive sciences. 

 But, then, it is a comfort to know that even 

 those devotees of these sciences who confess 

 a faith in this interpretation, never take 

 their faith with any large amount of prac- 

 tical seriousness. 



A second important way in which the 

 study of man is related to all the sciences 

 concerns the limitations of all science. We 

 are all familiar with the many mistaken 

 predictions as to the limitations of par- 

 ticular sciences which have been made in a 

 merely empirical way. In the "Memora- 

 bilia" Xenophon makes Socrates remark 

 upon the impiety of men in trying to de- 

 scribe how the gods made the world of 

 things; since all knowledge of this sort is 

 forever beyond the limits of human fac- 

 ulty. In the "Timffius," however, Plato 

 makes Socrates indulge in the wildest spec- 

 ulations, in dreams exceeding those of the 

 poet and resembling those of the mad- 

 house, as to how this same world may have 

 been made. No sane student of science 

 now believes that the actual limitations of 

 science are of either sort — either that as- 

 serted in the "Memorabilia" or that no- 

 tably transcended in the "Timseus. " It is 

 the business of science — a matter of obliga- 

 tion rather than a mark of impiety — to 

 know how the natural universe was made 

 and is being made. But when the mind 

 assumes to dream its way into this kind of 

 knowledge, it grossly violates the laws 

 which inexorably ' fix for all time its im- 

 passable limitations. Within the fields of 

 science itself there are constantly occurring 



