248 Science Religion and Reality 



omit consideration of what is most real in things, their qualitative 

 aspect, their incessant transformations and their individuality. 



LeRoy, much influenced by the anti-intellectualism of 

 Bergson, also pointed out many things about the scientific 

 method which compel agreement. Whereas the older positivism 

 of Comte went into ecstasies over the " fact " which it failed to 

 distinguish from pure data, LeRoy sees in the fact an unconscious 

 product of spiritual activity directed without knowing it towards a 

 practical end. The very name of " fact," says LeRoy, should 

 put us on our guard against believing that it is something outside 

 ourselves — on the contrary, that which has been imde, factum est, 

 cannot be made an immediate datum. There is no such thing as 

 an isolated fact, but everything flows into everything else, and to 

 dissect out facts from the body of reality is a proceeding that may 

 be very useful but cannot be ultimately valid. Isolation, frag- 

 mentation, analysis, these are the real watchwords of the scientific 

 method. There is, of course, below these isolated facts, a mysteri- 

 ous residuum of objectivity, but science cannot take this into 

 account, and according to LeRoy intuitionist philosophy is the only 

 thing that can. 



Future work in philosophy will probably not confirm all the 

 views of LeRoy, though as one of the sanest members of the 

 intuitionist school he will live in the future. The important part 

 of his philosophy for us is that there is a profoundly subjective 

 factor in science — quite unrealised by men such as Huxley and 

 Tyndall. The scientific man plays an active part in the selection 

 of the facts before him, and his selection of those facts is determined 

 by the construction of his mind. 



Duhem continued the thought of LeRoy and pointed out that 

 when a phenomenon is observed it is never observed purely but 

 always with a certain interpretative infusion. A law of common 

 sense being a general agreement may be either true or false, but a 

 law of natural science can be neither true nor false, because it is 

 fundamentally a symbol, and of symbols it can only be said that they 

 have been more or less well chosen. Duhem's arguments un- 

 doubtedly show that physical law cannot be said to describe absolute 

 reality, but at the same time they do not disprove that it contains 

 a certain amount of truth. 



These philosophers and many others have shown quite con- 

 clusively that the methods of science are inadequate for a complete 



