e and social
science are still glad enough to do, to help them in guessing and in
making a learned show before the public. But if divination and
eloquence--for science is out of the question--were to invoke nothing
but a fluid tendency to grow, we should be left with a flat history of
phenomena and no means of prediction or even classification. All
knowledge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely diffuse, perhaps
enlisting our dramatic feelings, but yielding no intellectual mastery
of experience, no practical competence, and no moral lesson. The world
would be a serial novel, to be continued for ever, and all men mere
novel-readers.

Nothing is more familiar to philosophers nowadays than that criticism
of knowledge by which we are thrown back upon the appearances from
which science starts, upon what is known to children and savages,
whilst all that which long experience and reason may infer from those
appearances is set down as so much hypothesis; and indeed it is
through hypothesis that latent being, if such there be, comes before
the mind at all. Now such criticism of knowledge might have been
straightforward and ingenuous. It might have simply disclosed the
fact, very salutary to meditate upon, that the whole frame of nature,
with the minds that animate it, is disclosed to us by intelligence;
that if we were not intelligent our sensations would exist for us
without meaning anything, as they exist for idiots. The criticism of
knowledge, however, has usually been taken maliciously, in the sense
that it is the idiots only that are not deceived; for any
interpretation of sensation is a mental figment, and while experience
may have any extent it will it cannot possibly, they say, have
expressive value; it cannot reveal anything going on beneath.
Intelligence and science are accordingly declared to have no
penetration, no power to disclose what is latent, for nothing latent
exists; they can at best furnish symbols for past or future sensations
and the order in which they arise; they can be seven-league boots for
striding over the surface of sentience.

This negative dogmatism as to knowledge was rendered harmless and
futile by the English philosophers, in that they maintained at the
same time that everything happens exactly _as if_ the intellect were a
true instrument of discovery, and _as if_ a material world underlay
our experience and furnished all its occasions. Hume, Mill, and Huxley
were scientific at heart, and f