ce: _The World and the Individual, First Series_, p. 465.

CHAPTER XII

CONCLUSION

[Sidenote: Liability of Philosophy to Revision, Due to its Systematic
Character.]

Sect. 195. One who consults a book of philosophy in the hope of finding
there a definite body of truth, sanctioned by the consensus of experts,
cannot fail to be disappointed. And it should now be plain that this is
due not to the frailties of philosophers, but to the meaning of
philosophy. Philosophy is not additive, but reconstructive. Natural
science may advance step by step without ever losing ground; its
empirical discoveries are in their severalty as true as they can ever
be. Thus the stars and the species of animals may be recorded
successively, and each generation of astronomers and zoologists may take
up the work at the point reached by its forerunners. The formulation of
results does, it is true, require constant correction and revision--but
there is a central body of data which is little affected, and which
accumulates from age to age. Now the finality of scientific truth is
proportional to the modesty of its claims. Items of truth persist,
while the interpretation of them is subject to alteration with the
general advance of knowledge; and, relatively speaking, science consists
in items of truth, and philosophy in their interpretation. The liability
to revision in science itself increases as that body of knowledge
becomes more highly unified and systematic. Thus the present age, with
its attempt to construct a single comprehensive system of mechanical
science, is peculiarly an age when fundamental conceptions are subjected
to a thorough re-examination--when, for example, so ancient a conception
as that of matter is threatened with displacement by that of energy. But
philosophy is _essentially unitary and systematic_--and thus
_superlatively liable to revision_.

[Sidenote: The One Science and the Many Philosophies.]

Sect. 196. It is noteworthy that it is only in this age of a highly
systematic natural science that _different_ systems are projected, as in
the case just noted of the rivalry between the strictly mechanical, or
corpuscular, theory and the newer theory of energetics. It has
heretofore been taken for granted that although there may be many
philosophies, there is but one body of science. And it is still taken
for granted that the experimental detail of the individual science is a
common fund, to the progressive increase