nalized Knowledge. Science is a name for knowledge in
its most characteristic form. It represents in its degree, the perfected
outcome of learning,--its consummation. What is known, in a given case,
is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think with
rather than that which we think about. In its honorable sense, knowledge
is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere
tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and
not dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is
difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our
certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is
natural. The undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual
hesitation; it is prone to assertion. It likes things undisturbed,
settled, and treats them as such without due warrant. Familiarity,
common repute, and congeniality to desire are readily made measuring
rods of truth. Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error,--a
greater foe to learning than ignorance itself. A Socrates is thus led
to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective
love of wisdom, and a Descartes to say that science is born of doubting.

We have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data, and
ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in themselves
they are tentative and provisional. Our predilection for premature
acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs
that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are
satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. If
these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose
that our assumptions have been confirmed. Even in the case of failure,
we are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness
of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of
circumstance. We charge the evil consequence not to the error of our
schemes and our incomplete inquiry into conditions (thereby getting
material for revising the former and stimulus for extending the latter)
but to untoward fate. We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in
clinging to our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out.

Science represents the safeguard of the race against these natural
propensities and the evils which flow from them. It consists of the
special appliances and methods whi