ty to
history. It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious
aberrations of the foretime. It has bridged the chasm, healed the
hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into
the human world.

I will even go one step farther. When from our present advanced
standpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whether
it be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that a
universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication
should ever have seemed to any one so little and plain a thing.
Whether it be Descartes's world or Newton's, whether it be that of the
materialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatises
of our own, it always looks the same to us,--incredibly perspectiveless
and short. Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousness
of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an
infantile and innocent look. Is it then likely that the science of our
own day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votaries
will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter? It
would be folly to suppose so. Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of
the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more
for its omissions of fact, for its {327} ignorance of whole ranges and
orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any
fatal lack in its spirit and principles. The spirit and principles of
science are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that need
hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal
forces are the starting-point of new effects. The only form of thing
that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely
have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our
thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of
personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of
that. And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as a
condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and
innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may,
conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very
defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own
boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make
it look perspectiveless and short.

[1] This Essay is formed of port