Page:Scientific Monthly, volume 14.djvu/67

 Again the objectivity of a natural science is relative to the character and measure of abstraction through which it was built up and the syntheses by which the separated elements were afterwards brought together and combined into a unity. This process of synthesis can never be carried to completion without the certain loss of objectivity in the resulting knowledge; and as long as it is not carried to completion we have no means by which to be assured that a matter first treated as essentially irrelevant shall not later come into the focus of attention. In fact, this very thing has recently happened in physics. In studying the properties of light physicists were for a long time con tent to leave out of account the gravitational field as having no appreciable (or even conceivable) influence; but the Einstein theory has forced them to a fundamental revision of this supposition and has led them to conceive of the ray of light as warped out of a straight path by the action of a powerful gravitational field.

The failure of science to obtain completely its universal ideal of objectivity does not diminish our interest in it. Indeed it is rendered more attractive to those of us who are pleased with a dynamic rather than a static world. Truth is never to be set off in tubes hermetically sealed. It is living and hence possesses the universal quality of life of doing the unexpected thing. Its growth is not hemmed in. We may look forward to its continued progress and novelty as long as we who develop it are finite intelligences.