July 5, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



19 



tity, the physical sciences have ' doors in 

 their paneling ' for the silent entrance of 

 psychical. Do you fail to see this ? Then, 

 I can now only suggest, and probably 

 I need only to suggest, that every one of 

 these physical notions, either implicitly or 

 explicitly, is paradoxical, and the paradox, 

 whenever it arises, shows the thinker be- 

 come a traitor to his chosen standpoint, to 

 his accepted forms — in the case in hand, of 

 course, to the forms and standpoint of 

 physical science.* ' Moreover, such con- 

 ceptions as conservation and plenitude and 

 vibration and rotation and infinit}^ depend- 

 ent as so largely they are upon what is 

 agreeably known as the scientific imagina- 

 tion, are usually recognized as the physical 

 basis of the very possibility of science, which 

 I would now venture to define, not as mind's 

 knowledge of matter, or in general of ob- 

 jective reality, but as mind's knowledge of 

 itself in matter or in objective reality. 

 Science, in other words, even special science, 

 even objective science, is self-consciousness ; 

 say a very realistic self- consciousness, the 

 self seen through the mirror of not- self; 

 which, although metaphysical and almost 

 offensive, reminds me and perhaps others 

 of Burns : 



" wad some power the giftie gie us, 



To see oursels as others see us ! 



It wad frae monie a blunder free us, 

 And foolish notion." 



The bonnie Robert was too much of a 

 specialist in poetry to see that science was 

 the very thing he prayed for. 



But now for further illustration of the 

 way in which thought defies specialism and 



* Thus conservation as quantitative is a paradox 

 since the constant quantity cannot be finite and in- 

 finity is not a mere quantity. The plenal medium 

 can be material only if displaced by material things 

 and plenal onlj' if not material and it is used, too, as 

 an immobile, albeit elastic to an infinitesimal sen- 

 sitiveness, basis of motion. Motion itself is also rest. 

 And infinity, as already implied, is a quantitative 

 paradox, which means a ' door ' for quality, for the 

 intensive unity of mind. 



conserves its universe I would mention sev- 

 eral important facts, that are certainly not 

 unfamiliar, as follows : Thus the social 

 sciences imply affinity for the physical sci- 

 ences, in that, besides their more special 

 divisions, they are constantly making ap- 

 peal to science in all its branches from 

 physics to psychology ; and the biological 

 sciences, in addition to their more conven- 

 tional forms, are becoming most hospitable 

 to ps5''chology, chemistry, and even to 

 mechanics. Again, all the different sci- 

 ences, however special, are wont to adopt 

 the same general method, as, for example, 

 the historical method, the consequences of 

 which to the cause of pure specialism may 

 easily be inferred. And, lastly, striking 

 analogies, other than that of method, are 

 always easily traceable among the sciences 

 of any particular time. Atomism in 

 physics is contemporary with individual- 

 ism — consider Democritus and the Sophists 

 — in politics ; a monarchical politics with 

 an anthropomorphic creationalistic theology 

 and a heliocentric astronomj' ; and a New- 

 tonian astronomy, which makes a law or 

 force instead of an individual body the real 

 center of the solar system, with democracy 

 or constitutionalism and inductive instead 

 of deductive logic and naturalistic theology ; 

 so that at no time, whatever a scientist's 

 interest, can he fail to have at least a 

 formal sympathy with other sciences. 

 Analogies among the sciences, so often rec- 

 ognized in these times, are not exactly 

 ' doors in the paneling,' but they may be 

 said to make the paneled partitions all but 

 unsubstantial and transparent. 



Specialism, then, is more formal than 

 real. The special science needs only to 

 develop to become, and to find itself, uni- 

 versal. The barriers with which it sur- 

 rounds itself gradually vanish into mere 

 imaginary lines, which only long usage can 

 possibly make seem substantial and opaque,^ 

 so that specialism by a logic of its own or by 



