tesy which are set by self-respect and consideration
for others. I am therefore glad to be favoured with Mr. Gladstone's
acknowledgment of the success of my efforts. I only wish that I could
accept all the products of Mr. Gladstone's gracious appreciation, but
there is one about which, as a matter of honesty, I hesitate. In fact,
if I had expressed my meaning better than I seem to have done, I doubt
if the particular proffer of Mr. Gladstone's thanks would have been
made.

To my mind, whatever doctrine professes to be the result of the
application of the accepted rules of inductive and deductive logic to
its subject-matter; and which accepts, within the limits which it
sets to itself, the supremacy of reason, is Science. Whether the
subject-matter consists of realities or unrealities, truths or
falsehoods, is quite another question. I conceive that ordinary geometry
is science, by reason of its method, and I also believe that its axioms,
definitions, and conclusions are all true. However, there is a geometry
of four dimensions, which I also believe to be science, because its
method professes to be strictly scientific. It is true that I cannot
conceive four dimensions in space, and therefore, for me, the whole
affair is unreal. But I have known men of great intellectual powers who
seemed to have no difficulty either in conceiving them, or, at any
rate, in imagining how they could conceive them; and, therefore,
four-dimensioned geometry comes under my notion of science. So I think
astrology is a science, in so far as it professes to reason logically
from principles established by just inductive methods. To prevent
misunderstanding, perhaps I had better add that I do not believe one
whit in astrology; but no more do I believe in Ptolemaic astronomy, or
in the catastrophic geology of my youth, although these, in their day,
claimed--and, to my mind, rightly claimed--the name of science. If
nothing is to be called science but that which is exactly true from
beginning to end, I am afraid there is very little science in the world
outside mathematics. Among the physical sciences, I do not know that any
could claim more than that it is true within certain limits, so narrow
that, for the present at any rate, they may be neglected. If such is the
case, I do not see where the line is to be drawn between exactly true,
partially true, and mainly untrue forms of science. And what I have said
about the current theology at the end of my