the position
that the doctrine of the conservation of energy constitutes the "ultimate
datum" of science, I think it will be enough to observe that if this is
_not_ the "ultimate datum" of science, science can have no "ultimate datum"
at all. For any datum more ultimate than permanent existence is manifestly
impossible, while any such datum as non-permanent existence would clearly
render science impossible. Even, therefore, if such hypercriticism had a
valid basis of apparently adverse fact whereon to stand, I should feel
myself justified in neglecting it on _a priori_ grounds; but the only basis
on which such hypercriticism can rest is, not the knowledge of any adverse
facts, but the ignorance of certain facts which we must either conclude to
be facts or else conclude that science can have no ultimate datum whereon
to rest. In the foregoing essays, therefore, I have not scrupled to
maintain that the ultimate datum of science is destructive of teleology as
a scientific argument for Theism; because, unless we deny the possibility
of any such ultimate datum, and so land ourselves in hopeless scepticism,
we must conclude that there can be no datum more ultimate than
this--Permanent Existence; and this is just the datum which we have seen to
be destructive of teleology as a scientific argument for Theism.

It may be well to point out that from this ultimate datum of science--or
rather, let us say, of experience--there follows a deductive explanation of
the law of causation. For this law, when stripped of all the metaphysical
corruptions with which it has been so cumbersomely clothed, simply means
that a given collocation of antecedents unconditionally produces a certain
consequent. But this fact, otherwise stated, amounts to nothing more than a
re-statement of the ultimate datum of experience--the fact that energy is
indestructible. For if this latter fact be granted, it is obvious that the
so-called law of causation follows as a deductive necessity--or rather, as
I have said, that this law becomes but another way of expressing the same
fact. This is obvious if we reflect that the only means we have of
ascertaining that energy is _not_ destructible, is by observing that
similar antecedents _do_ invariably determine similar consequents. It is as
a vast induction from all those particular cases of sequence-changes which
collectively we call causation that we conclude energy to be
indestructible. And, obversely, having conclude