Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/128

 from what has heen what will be again. It is prevision, that is, such a perception of the properties and relations of things as will enable us to see beforehand what effects will be produced in different times, places, and circumstances. Phenomena that elude measurement may yet occur with such regularity as to be foreseen with certainty. There is, in fact, a qualitative science which precedes quantitative, for properties must be known before they can be measured, but the test of prevision applies to the lower or qualitative stage as well as to the higher. Because biology, psychology, and sociology are not, and never can be, exact sciences, is therefore no reason for impugning their results as untrustworthy or without authority.

We quite agree with Mr. Godwin that Science is inexorably shut up in the finite and the phenomenal—the sphere of relation and law: but she must have the liberty of the whole domain. Nor do we think there is much danger of Science wasting her energies in trying to transcend these bounds, for she has plenty to do to get even partial possession of what confessedly belongs to her. She has won her ground, inch by inch, by hard fighting from the beginning, and even yet it is conceded to her only in name. Everybody will admit that it is the right of Science to inquire into all changes and effects in physical Nature. Yet, for suggesting that a given class of alleged physical effects be inquired into in the same manner as are other effects, Prof. Tyndall has been posted through Christendom as a blasphemer. Mr. Godwin yields to Science the realm of the finite and the relative, and in the same breath he speaks of the relations of Mozart to the laws of music, and of Shakespeare to the laws of the human heart, as examples of the trans-phenomenal. But we thought laws and relations had been made over to science. No reservation will here be tolerated. Science is providing for its ever-increasing army of research through a long future. Half a thousand years have been spent in getting on the track; another thousand will suffice to get under headway; she stipulates now only for room. Her sphere is the finite, but the nebulosities of ignorance must not be mistaken for the walls of the infinite. If mystics will lose themselves in the tangled recesses of unresolved phenomena, they must expect to be hunted out and have the place reclaimed to order and annexed to the provinces of all-harmonizing law. Nor can any pretext that they are nested in the unapproachable essences and subtleties of being, and ensphered in the absolute, and guarded by cunning sphinxes, avail them. The thing must inexorably be inquired of. It is the destiny of Science to pierce the unknown; if her spear is blunted upon the unknowable, she will of course accept the results of the experiment.

But, though scientists are hopelessly closed in, Mr. Godwin does not despair of others getting out, and he asks: "Is thought, whose expatiations are so restless and irrepressible, to be forever shut up to the phenomenal and relative? Is it to be forever stifled under a bushel-measure, or tied up by the legs with a surveyor's chain?" But the phenomenal and the relative go a great ways. Mr. Godwin talks as if "God's measureless world" were a stifling prison. We have been reminded that "Nature is a prodigious quantity," and we are so strongly impressed with this truth that we do not like Mr. Godwin's figure, of a "bushel-measure" to symbolize its extent, any more than we like his favorite figure of "mud" to symbolize its quality. As to his question whether thought is to be tied by the legs with a surveyor's chain, we suspect that it is "tied" by something a good deal stronger than that: namely, by the laws of its own nature. He is skeptical about the science of psychology, and asks for its agreements. The