ot yet happened and may never happen
at all. But that I think is a defect of my particular branch of the
subject. Progress in art, if progress is anything more than a natural
process of growth to be followed inevitably by a natural process of
decay, has never yet happened in art; but there is now an effort to make
it happen, an effort to exercise the human will in art more completely
and consciously than it has ever been exercised before. Therefore I
could do nothing but attempt to describe that effort and to speculate
upon its success.

X

PROGRESS IN SCIENCE

F.S. MARVIN

'L'Esprit travaillant sur les donnees de l'experience.'

The French phrase, neater as usual than our own, may be taken as the
starting-point in our discussion. We shall put aside such questions as
what an experience is, or how much the mind itself supplies in each
experience, or what, if anything, is the not-mind upon which the mind
works. We must leave something for the chapter on philosophy; and the
present chapter is primarily historical. Having defined what we mean by
science, we are to consider at what stage in history the working of the
mind on experience can be called scientific, in what great strides
science has leapt forward since its definite formation, and in what ways
this growth of science has affected general progress, both by its action
on the individual and on the welfare and unity of mankind.

Our French motto must be qualified in order to give us precision in our
definition and a starting-point in history for science in the strict
sense. In a general sense the action of the mind upon the given in
experience has been going on from the beginning of animal life. But
science, strictly so-called, does not appear till men have been
civilized and settled in large communities for a considerable time. We
cannot ascribe 'science' to the isolated savage gnawing bones in his
cave, though the germs are there, in every observation that he makes of
the world around him and every word that he utters to his mates. But we
may begin to speak of science when we reach those large and ordered
societies which are found in the great river-basins and sedentary
civilizations of East and West, especially in Egypt and Chaldea.

When we turn to the quality of the thing itself, we note in the first
place that while science may be said to begin with mere description, it
implies from the first a certain degree of order and accuracy, and this
o