tinctively used as a working hypothesis. So used
it accumulates perpetually increasing evidence of its truth, and if we
except two great classes of facts, we never find any instance of its
failure. The two classes of facts which are thus excepted are the acts
of the human will and the miraculous element in Revelation, both of them
instances of one thing, namely, the interference of the moral with the
physical. To complete the induction and to deprive the denial of
universal uniformity of all evidence to rest on, all that is necessary
is to get rid of these two exceptions. If Science could get rid of these
exceptions, though it could not be said that the fundamental postulate
was demonstrated, it could be said that all the evidence was in its
favour and absolutely no evidence against it. And although scientific
belief would then still rank below mathematical belief, it would
nevertheless have a cogency quite irresistible. Science would not
thereby gain in power of progress, in practical acceptance, or in
utility to man. But men are so constituted that completeness gives a
special kind of satisfaction not to be got in any other way. If Science
could but be complete it would seem to gain in dignity, if it gained in
nothing else. And it is easy to foster a kind of passion for this
completeness until every attempt to question it is resented. I have
seen a boy first learning mechanics show a dislike to consider the
effect of friction as marring the symmetry and beauty of mechanical
problems; too vague, too uncertain, too irregular to be allowed any
entrance into a system which is so rounded and so precise without it.
And something of the same temper can sometimes be seen in students of
Science at the very thought of there being anything in the world not
under the dominion of the great scientific postulate. The world which
thus contains something which Science cannot deal with is pronounced
forthwith to be not the world that we know, not the world with which we
are concerned; a conceivable world if we choose to indulge our
imagination in such dreams, but not a real world either now or at any
time before or after. And yet the freedom of the human will and the
sense which cannot be eradicated of the responsibility attaching to all
human conduct, perpetually retorts that this world in which we live
contains an element which cannot be subdued to obedience to the
scientific law, but will have a course of its own. The sense of
respon