Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/11

 unity without or within is a dream of an impossible return to a past simplicity which perhaps never was present. Whether in this Wirr-warr of beings, happenings, relations, &c., there is any unity, any plan or system, that, so we are told, we cannot ever know—ignoramus et ignorabimus. The outlook for Philosophy seems desperate enough.

Such doubts, it will perhaps be replied, are extravagant and metaphysical: can they not be met with a solvitur ambulando? Are not many, perhaps most, of the differences which meet us so slight as to be negligible? And between differents do we not also find threads of connexion? Can we not in fact, and with a correctness guaranteed by success in attaining our aims, group and range together elements in our experience? Undoubtedly we can and do proceed by such abstraction and simplification of the given, and we find our account in it. The facts supplied to us are patient of such treatment, and so treated answer to some at least of our demands upon them, though at times, and in serious, perhaps the most serious, cases, they recalcitrate and prove unpredictably and disconcertingly treacherous. It is no mere paradox that nothing happens but the unexpected. We must in all honesty admit that we have no right to confidence in any event, that our abstractions and neglects are arbitrary, our groupings and generalizations provisional, and our successes and failures alike no better than matters of inscrutable luck.

Granted that this is true of the rude results of practical common sense, does not the existence of the sciences give us a better-grounded hope? No; the sciences but carry further with greater conscientiousness and more discretion in statement the precarious methods of procedure begun in practical common sense. They profit in reputation by reckoning