500 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



intellect, but by bringing us at every turn to frontiers wliicli 

 that intellect is unable to cross. 



Thus we may emphatically assert that science is not the force 

 calculated to give the greatest value to Ufe, while developing the 

 tendency to widen the sphere of conflict. On the contrary, 

 science, having stimulated the expansion of life, brings that 

 expansion to a standstill ; having awakened hopes and aspira- 

 tions, it condemns these hopes and aspirations to sterility ; 

 having created an ardent thirst for knowledge, it is unable to 

 quench that thirst. The question of the value of life remains 

 exactly where it was before the prodigious development of 

 science in the nineteenth century. The old blind faith in science 

 held by the Materiahst school associated with the names of 

 Ludwig Biichner, Karl Vogt, and Jacob Moleschott, has now 

 gone ; and the man of science reaUses, more than anyone else, 

 how small is the much-vaunted human intellect in comparison 

 with that which transcends the human intellect. Herbert 

 Spencer was unquestionably right : the education which possesses 

 the greatest value is science ; for it is only by a study of the 

 great problems of science, whether physico-chemical, or physio- 

 logical, or psychological, or sociological, that we really under- 

 stand the limits of our knowledge. 



The pretensions of science to the moral and intellectual 

 direction of human evolution are thus imjustifiable ; the very 

 fact of the Unknowable shows us that there exists a domain 

 transcending the domain of science, and one over which science 

 can have no authority. The claims of science to interfere in 

 the domain of moraUty, of art, or of rehgion are null and void. 

 We must always remember that the world possesses a depth 

 which we cannot sound. It is precisely the " tension of the 

 soul which stiffens itself under the stress of suffering and learns 

 to become strong," which a physiological formula cannot explain 

 to us ; just as it cannot explain those overflowings of the soul 

 which manifest themselves in every work of genius ; just as it 



