s leaps in the dark; for knowledge once
gained casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries. There
is no discovery so limited as not to illuminate something beyond
itself. The force of intellectual penetration into this penumbral
region which surrounds actual knowledge is not, as some seem to think,
dependent upon method, but upon the genius of the investigator. There
is, however, no genius so gifted as not to need control and
verification. The profoundest minds know best that Nature's ways are
not at all times their ways, and that the brightest flashes in the
world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have
their counterparts in the world of fact. Thus the vocation of the
true experimentalist may be defined as the continued exercise of
spiritual insight, and its incessant correction and realisation. His
experiments constitute a body, of which his purified intuitions are,
as it were, the soul.

Partly through mathematical and partly through experimental research,
physical science has, of late years, assumed a momentous position in
the world. Both in a material and in an intellectual point of view it
has produced, and it is destined to produce, immense changes--vast
social ameliorations, and vast alterations in the popular conception
of the origin, rule, and governance of natural things. By science, in
the physical world, miracles are wrought, while philosophy is
forsaking its ancient metaphysical channels, and pursuing others which
have been opened, or indicated by, scientific research. This must
become more and more the case as philosophical writers become more
deeply imbued with the methods of science, better acquainted with the
facts which scientific men have established, and with the great
theories which they have elaborated.

If you look at the face of a watch, you see the hour and minute-hands,
and possibly also a second-hand, moving over the graduated dial. Why
do these hands move? and why are their relative motions such as they
are observed to be? These questions cannot be answered without
opening the watch, mastering its various parts, and ascertaining their
relationship to each other. When this is done, we find that the
observed motion of the hands follows of necessity from the inner
mechanism of the watch when acted upon by the force invested in the
spring. The motion of the hands may be called a phenomenon of art,
but the case is similar with the phenomena of nat