y for which the annual congress of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science furnishes the
opportunity. Glib writers in various journals regularly seize this
occasion to pour forth their lamentations concerning the incapacity of
"science" and the disappointment which they experience in finding that
it does not do what it never professed to do. They deplore that those
engaged in the making of that new knowledge of nature which we call
"science" do not discover things which they never set out to discover
or thought it possible to discover, although the glib gentlemen who
write, with a false assumption of knowledge, pretend that these things
are what the investigations of scientific inquirers are intended to
ascertain. We read, at that season of the year, articles upon "What
Scientists do not know" and "The Bankruptcy of Science," in which it
is pretended that the purpose of science is to solve the mystery, or,
as it has been called, the "riddle," of the universe, and it is
pointed out, with something like malicious satisfaction, that, to
judge by the proceedings of the congress of scientific investigators
just concluded, we are no nearer a solution of that mystery than men
were in the days of Aristotle: and it is added that false hopes have
been raised, and that matters which were once considered settled have
again passed into the melting-pot!

This kind of lamentation is not only (if I may use an expressive term)
"twaddle," but is injurious misrepresentation, dangerous to the
public welfare. The actual attitude of the investigators and makers of
new knowledge of nature is stated in a few words which I wrote ten
years ago: "The whole order of nature, including living and lifeless
matter--from man to gas--is a network of mechanism, the main features
and many details of which have been made more or less obvious to the
wondering intelligence of mankind by the labour and ingenuity of
scientific investigators. But no sane man has ever pretended, since
science became a definite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can
hope to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing, whence this
mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and what
there may or may not be beyond and beside it which our senses are
incapable of appreciating. These things are not 'explained' by science
and never can be."

So much for those who reproach science with the non-fulfilment of
their own unwarranted and perfectly gratui