istry and
physics go, it scarcely matters which assumption we adopt, the number
of units is so great, the individual difference so drowned and lost. For
purposes of enquiry and discussion the incorrect one is infinitely more
convenient.

But this ceases to be true directly we emerge from the region of
chemistry and physics. In the biological sciences of the eighteenth
century, common-sense struggled hard to ignore individuality in shells
and plants and animals. There was an attempt to eliminate the more
conspicuous departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's weak
moments; and it was only with the establishment of Darwin's great
generalizations that the hard and fast classificatory system broke down
and individuality came to its own. Yet there had always been a clearly
felt difference between the conclusions of the biological sciences and
those dealing with lifeless substance, in the relative vagueness, the
insubordinate looseness and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist
accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantly
from generalization to generalization after the fashion of the chemist
or physicist. It is easy to see, therefore, how it came about that the
inorganic sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was
scarcely suspected that the biological sciences might perhaps after all
be TRUER than the experimental, in spite of the difference in practical
value in favour of the latter. It was, and is by the great majority of
people to this day, supposed to be the latter that are invincibly true;
and the former are regarded as a more complex set of problems merely,
with obliquities and refractions that presently will be explained away.
Comte and Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that
much for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and
unknowable, but not in this sense as an element of inexactness running
through all things. He thought, it seems to me, of the unknown as the
indefinable Beyond of an immediate world that might be quite clearly and
definitely known.

There is a growing body of people which is beginning to hold the
converse view--that counting, classification, measurement, the whole
fabric of mathematics, is subjective and untrue to the world of fact,
and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the
number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness
of generalization increases, because i