Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/127

Rh validity of biological and psychological sciences on the intrinsic ground that they lack exactitude. It would have been a point gained for his argument to enforce the test of exactness, as then these sciences would pass under a cloud of discredit. But the test cannot be accepted. His method of criticism would throttle every science in its growing stages before completeness of demonstration had been attained. He insists upon a criterion which would abolish half the sciences and strip the remainder of all validity and authority except in their perfected forms. Referring to his address, he remarks:

Now, nothing is more certain than that we can never arrive at what Nature really is except through the pathway of "what Nature may be supposed to be." All science begins with guesses and conjectures, and its most valid laws were at first but suppositions. The evidence by which scientific truth is determined necessarily involves suppositions to which it has been applied, and these have to be gradually confirmed; hence, if exactitude is demanded at the outset, all science becomes impossible.

To get at the full bearing of this matter we quote the original passage as it stands in the revised address of the proceedings at the Tyndall Banquet. It reads:

We think that Mr. Godwin here lends countenance to a prevailing fallacy. Science is perpetually bidden to keep within her sphere, and the popular notion of her sphere is that of experimentation. To most people the word science connotes physical or experimental science. On this tacit assumption Mr. Godwin declares that cubic measure, forceps, and crucibles, are not applicable to love, fancy, and thought. Most true; but will he maintain that these are therefore not amenable to scientific scrutiny? As we understand it, science is a knowledge of the constitution of things; of the uniformities of the phenomena of Nature. Whatever, in the universe around us, or in the world within us, is open to cognition, which can be examined and known, and reexamined and verified, is the proper subject-matter of science, and the term is applied to all the knowledge that has been arrived at in this way. An emotion may be analyzed and understood as well as a mineral. Love, fancy, and thought, cannot be subjected to laboratory processes, but they may be known in their laws and relations as mental phenomena, and in this aspect they belong as strictly to science as metals or gases. That they cannot be weighed makes no difference, because exactness is not the criterion of science. Mr. Godwin asks, Where, then, does the inexactness come in? To which we reply, wherever the instruments, by which exactness is reached, are inapplicable, or can only be imperfectly applied. The best criterion of science is derived from the fact of order and uniformity in Nature by which one thing implies another, and we