Page:The Foundations of Science (1913).djvu/28

10 indeed ‘relative’ truths, capable of being tested once for all by the ‘inconceivability of the opposite,’ and certain to hold true for the whole ‘knowable’ universe. Thus, whether one dwelt upon the results of such a mathematical procedure as that to which M. Poincaré refers in his opening paragraphs, or whether, like Spencer himself, one applied the ‘first principles’ to regions of less exact science, this confidence that a certain orthodoxy regarding the principles of science was established forever was characteristic of the followers of the movement in question. Experience, lighted up by reason, seemed to them to have predetermined for all future time certain great theoretical results regarding the real constitution of the ‘knowable’ cosmos. Whoever doubted this doubted ‘the verdict of science.’

Some of us well remember how, when Stallo’s ‘Principles and Theories of Modern Physics’ first appeared, this sense of scientific orthodoxy was shocked amongst many of our American readers and teachers of science. I myself can recall to mind some highly authoritative reviews of that work in which the author was more or less sharply taken to task for his ignorant presumption in speaking with the freedom that he there used regarding such sacred possessions of humanity as the fundamental concepts of physics. That very book, however, has quite lately been translated into German as a valuable contribution to some of the most recent efforts to reconstitute a modern ‘philosophy of nature.’ And whatever may be otherwise thought of Stallo’s critical methods, or of his results, there can be no doubt that, at the present moment, if his book were to appear for the first time, nobody would attempt to discredit the work merely ‘on account of its disposition to be agnostic regarding the objective reality of the concepts of the kinetic theory of gases, or on account of its call for a logical rearrangement of the fundamental concepts of the theory of energy. We are no longer able so easily to know heretics at first sight.

For we now appear to stand in this position: The control of natural phenomena, which through the sciences men have attained, grows daily vaster and more detailed, and in its details more assured. Phenomena men know and predict better than ever. But regarding the most general theories, and the