Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/282

278 on materialistic physical science, has been undeniably hostile to the nobler element of man's nature.

And so it happens that the inevitable reaction is appearing in such phenomena as that which in the political realm of our country is called the progressive spirit, strongly tinctured with religious zeal, and perhaps still more significantly in such mystical manifestations as Christian Science and Theosophy, and the far more soberly wrought out philosophical systems of Bergson and Eucken.

What now, we must inquire, is the fundamental difference between what I am calling the natural history mode of viewing nature and the materialistic mode; and wherein may the former be claimed to be more in accordance with the needs of what is best in man's nature?

The whole problem rests inevitably on the essential processes and composition of our knowledge of the world and can not be touched with the least prospect of success without due attention to what we call the attributes of natural bodies.

That these attributes are the common and ultimate ground of both the world itself and of our knowledge of it, is not only demonstrably true, but is truth of such kind that it needs no laborious demonstration except for minds that have become sophisticated by overstraining in trying to answer ill-considered questions. Common sense never strives after a single ultimate, invisible substance, either physical or meta' physical, in the orange behind the roundness, yellowness, heaviness, semi-softness, sweetness, juciness, and so on of it. Nor does science ever really demonstrate any such thing, however laboriously it may search for it. What it does accomplish is the resolution or analysis of the orange into innumerable constituent bodies, cells, nuclei, chromosomes and chemical compounds, solid, liquid and gaseous, chemical simples, electrons, et cetera. But—and here is a point of prime importance—each and every one of these bodies or objects has its own peculiar attributes exactly as the original orange had.

Scientific analysis of the objects of nature always runs in a two-fold stream: There are the analyses of the objects into constituent objects, and of stages into precedent stages; and there are the parallel analyses of these constituent objects into their attributes. Each and every object and grade of objects has its own attributes. These latter and these alone secure for the objects places in our knowledge. Now it so happens that all objects in the world as common experience finds them have many attributes never entirely attainable, so far as we can make out, or recognizable by any single one of our senses. We have an enormous amount of evidence to the effect that all objects of nature whatever possess attributes fitted to our senses of touch and sight at least. We have no well-established experience of any natural object having but a single attribute, or even a group of attributes appropriate to but a single sense.