586 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
been misdirected, in that in addition to its search for facts it has used those facts 
in a controversial sense, as against dogma—as if it made any difference to the 
fact what dogma taught. It does not change the fact of existence or destination one 
way or the other whether dogma be right or wrong—the result of the fact is purely 
intellectual freedom. 
It matters not to knowledge whether dogma preaches a delusion, and it is a 
mistake in science, while denying to dogma the right to make a god, to copy its 
assumption by making him through a furnace or defining his attributes through 
optics. God-making is the by-path in all times that has led aside from the royal 
highway of knowledge, and the disciples of science can only follow it to the fail- 
ure of their true mission. 
In a former paper which I had the honor of reading before you, about life 
theories, after summing up all that had been then discovered, the result was given 
in these words: ‘‘ There is no physical basis upon which a knowledge of how life 
came can rest. So far as those who assume to answer for science, there has been 
no answer.’’ And the same must be said to-day. Since then much has been 
written, but no change in the verdict. The declaration of Tyndall still stands: 
that there is nothing living that did not derive its life from a pre-existing hving 
thing. And M. Quatrefages, the most eminent of anthropologists, in a work since 
published, sums up the result of his life’s labor, of his investigations and those of 
his co-laborers in this special field, in the all conclusive declaration: ‘‘I do not 
know.” 
Still the inquiry goes on, and the best minds in science, the most skilled in 
special investigation are as unceasing as ever, and the work of interrogating 
nature goes forward with zeal unabated and with vigor unrelaxed. The question 
of method is now the one that engages most attention, and what we may call the 
new hypothesis is that to which the highest skill and choicest learning are devoted. 
In science, as in everything else, the phenomena of the human mind are 
manifest. We find those who are prone to rest on every new fact as final and 
covering the limit of what is knowable—counterparts of what we call the “‘ con- 
servative” in social Science. Newton never supposed that he knew everything, 
yet there are multitudes who think he did, and these are always pulling back on 
the wheels of progress and new discovery. And itis these men who cry out: 
‘¢away with hypothesis, give us facts,”’ while all that Newton ever discovered 
was the fruit of hypothesis. Science to-day is but a grain of fact in a measure 
of hypothesis, and our scientific literature is a volume of hypothesis from a 
chapter of facts. Hypotheses are to science what fertilizers are to the soil—the 
cause of the crop of fact. 
One of the greatest obstacles to the presentation of philosophic truth is the 
necessity of using names, since the words employed to express abstract ideas of 
conditions by the mere force of repetition come to be associated in the mind as 
tangible things, and form a sort of intellectual furniture, only to hinder the clear 
conception and expression of things that have no tangibility, and, to be clearly 
understood, must be thought of aside from any material comparisons. 
