ce
has, or can by the loyal efforts of truth seekers be made to possess, a
real unity, superior in its nature and significance to any detached
observer's experience, more genuinely real than is the mere collection
of the experiences of any set of detached observers, however large_. The
student of natural science is loyal to the cause of the enlargement of
this organized and criticized realm of the common human experience.
Unless this unity of human experience is a genuine reality, unless all
the workers are living a really common life, unless each man is,
potentially at least, in a live spiritual unity with his fellows,
science itself is a mere metaphor, its truth is an illusion, its results
are myths. For science is conceived as true only by conceiving the
experiences of countless observers as the sharing of a common realm of
experience. If, as we all believe, the natural sciences do throw a real,
if indeed an inadequate, light upon the nature of things, then they do
so because no one man's experience is disconnected from the real whole
of human experience. They do so because the cause to which the loyal
study of science is devoted, the cause of the enlargement of human
experience, is a cause that has a supernatural, or, as Professor
Muensterberg loves to say, an over-individual, type of reality. Mankind
is not a mere collection of detached individuals, or man could possess
no knowledge of any unity of scientific truth. If men are really only
many, and if they have no such unity of conscious experience as loyalty
everywhere presupposes, then the cause of science also is a vain
illusion, and we have no unified knowledge of nature, only various
private fancies about nature. If we know, however ill, nature's
mechanism, we do so because human experience is not merely a collection
of detached observations, but forms an actual spiritual unity, whose
type is not that of a mechanism, whose connections are ideally
significant, whose constitution is essentially that which the ideal of
unified truth requires.

So, then, I insist, the dilemma is upon our hands. Either the sciences
constitute a progressive, if imperfect, insight into real truth--and
then the cause of the unity of human experience is a real cause that
really can be served exactly as the lover means to be loyal to his
friendship and the patriot to his country; and then also human life
really possesses such unity as the loyal presuppose--or else none of
this is so. B