56 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



the right to make deductions and formulate laws, yet 

 the older science placed very definite limits on the 

 process. It cheerfully admitted two entities of the 

 sort that could be treated with its measuring rods, 

 and deduced a law connecting the one with the other. 

 An entity of any other sort was denied. Before a 

 fact or entity which seemed to stand by itself, with no 

 other similar fact or entity in some sort of relation 

 before it, science threw up its hands. We may put 

 this more clearly by a familiar illustration. There 

 seems no doubt that there is a something which we 

 call the universe. It is filled with matter which in its 

 microscopic aspects: nebulae, suns, galaxies, is of re- 

 markable simplicity and uniformity. One little sec- 

 tion of it is filled with matter and facts of the utmost 

 intricacy and complexity; — the mystery of life; — what 

 Conklin has termed the "diabolical ingenuity" of that 

 same life to provide that a male and a female element 

 may meet and keep life going; the mystery of thought 

 and what we term originality, that creative element in 

 man which makes new combinations and new sub- 

 stances. 



These greater facts are vastly more important, as 

 well as vastly more difficult than the number of 

 chromosomes in a cell or the temperature relations 

 of a cooling alloy. Must science, as in the past, re- 

 fuse absolutely to have anything to do with the con- 

 sideration of these greater facts, and simply lump 

 them as unknowable? In other words, must science 

 refuse to apply reason and analysis to data which 

 seem self-sufficient and without antecedent explana- 

 tory data? We call such a process speculation, yet it 

 would seem that a moderate amount of speculation 



