February 21, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



287 



The attempt lias indeed been made to ac- 

 count for forms, laws, innate ideas — call 

 them what you will — as the results of a 

 process of evolution. In my judgment, 

 such an attempt must always remain a 

 complete failure. The so-called primitive 

 man in the long gone-by ages reasoned in 

 substantially the same way as that in which 

 the German professor of physics or the 

 American financier or politician reasons 

 to-day. Nor does it appear that the savage 

 peoples of the present time have essentially 

 different minds from our own, or are in- 

 trinsically inferior in the acuteness, speed 

 and accuracy with which they reason. 

 Their limitations, as compared with ours, 

 consist chiefly, if not wholly, in the extent 

 of the accumulations of experience with a 

 wider world of things and of men, which 

 lie behind them in history and which con- 

 stitute their present environment. But we 

 as well as they, and no less truly than they, 

 when we measure things by minding them, 

 know them only according to the formal 

 limitations of our own minds. These lim- 

 itations concern the comprehensiveness, the 

 certainty, the range, both toward the large 

 and toward the small, the simple and the 

 complicated. The infinite and the infin- 

 itesimal may be symbolized and carried as 

 sj^mbols through complex mathematical 

 calculations; but they can never be en- 

 visaged by the senses or comprehended by 

 the intellect. 



This sort of irremovable limitations sur- 

 round all the growth and all the achieve- 

 ments of the particular sciences, and might 

 be set forth at any length in the discussion 

 of the categories of science. But such a 

 discussion would be too technical for our 

 present purpose and would take us much 

 too far afield. 



Some illustration of what is meant will 

 serve our present purpose. The history of 

 the growth of science for two thousand 



years shows many curious attempts to dis- 

 pense with the obligations put upon the 

 human intellect by the so-called categories, 

 or fundamental and irreducible forms of 

 conceiving of reality, that seem to flow 

 from the very nature of the intellect itself. 

 This effort among the students of physics 

 is particularly insistent and even violent 

 at the present time. But it is just as cer- 

 tainly doomed to failure now as it has ever 

 been. For example, we are treated to a 

 science of physics which would do away 

 with the realistic conceptions of substance 

 and cause, and would substitute for them 

 the more impressionistic and phenomenal 

 conceptions of motion and change. For do 

 we not, with our senses, which are the 

 measure of all things, of that which is, how 

 it is, and of that which is not, how it is not, 

 become actually aware of motions and of 

 changes? But who ever saw, heard, felt, 

 smelled or tasted, of a substance or a cause, 

 in the metaphysical meaning of these 

 words ? Go to, then ! Let us banish meta- 

 physics and confine our scientific measure- 

 ments to what the senses can actually per- 

 ceive. But the conception of motion with- 

 out this adjunct or underlying conception 

 of something real that actually moves, or 

 the conception of a change that is not 

 caused, or compelled by, or otherwise to be 

 atti-ibuted to, some actually existent agent, 

 is a ghostly and intolerable conception. 

 And the world in which relations of motion 

 are supposed to be the sole topic for scien- 

 tific investigation, is a ghostly and not a 

 real world. But we may always observe 

 by reading between the lines that the ' ' sci- 

 entist," because he is also a man, and is 

 under the limitations of human intellect, 

 has allowed to sneak in at the back door 

 the very conceptions which he has more or 

 less impolitely dismissed from the front. 

 He must have a ' ' that-which ' ' as substance 

 for his observed motions and as a point of 



