y will be a vain sentiment and religion a delusion.

Nor will the failure of thought, when once demonstrated in these upper
regions, be confined to them. On the contrary, it will spread downwards
to science and ordinary knowledge, as mountain mists blot out the
valleys. For every synthesis of fact to fact, every attempt to know,
however humble and limited, is inspired by a secret faith in the unity
of the world. Each of the sciences works within its own region, and
colligates its details in the light of its own hypothesis; and all the
sciences taken together presuppose the presence in the world of a
principle that binds it into an orderly totality. Scientific explorers
know that they are all working towards the same centre. And, ever and
anon, as the isolated thinker presses home his own hypothesis, he finds
his thought beating on the limits of his science, and suggesting some
wider hypothesis. The walls that separate the sciences are wearing thin,
and at times light penetrates from one to the other. So that to their
votaries, at least, the faith is progressively justified, that there is
a meeting point for the sciences, a central truth in which the dispersed
rays will again be gathered together. In fact, all the sciences are
working together under the guidance of a principle common to them all,
although it may not be consciously known and no attempt is made to
define it. In science, as in philosophy and art and religion, there is a
principle of unity, which, though latent, is really prior to all
explanation of particular matters of fact.

In truth, man has only one way of knowing. There is no fundamental
difference between scientific and philosophic procedure. We always light
up facts by means of general laws. The fall of the stone was a perfect
enigma, a universally unintelligible bit of experience, till the
majestic imagination of Newton conceived the idea of universal
gravitation. Wherever mind successfully invades the realm of chaos,
poetry, the sense of the whole, comes first. There is the intuitive
flash, the penetrative glimpse, got no one knows exactly whence--though
we do know that it comes neither from the dead facts nor from the vacant
region of _a priori_ thought, but somehow from the interaction of both
these elements of knowledge. After the intuitive flash comes the slow
labour of proof, the application of the principle to details. And that
application transforms both the principle and the details, so tha