Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/143

82 enough, there are not wanting philosophers, and schools of philosophy, who read pantheism in science, as science appears to them. But the question is, Is such a reading the authentic teaching of science itself? Here we must not mistake the utterances of men of science for the voice of science as such. For on this borderland of science and philosophy it need not be surprising if men only familiar with the method of investigation which science pursues, and not greatly at home in the varied and complex history of philosophical thought, should sometimes incline to a hasty inference when the borderland is reached, should overlook the fact that their science and its method have necessary limits, and in philosophy take the view which an illegitimate extension of their method would indicate. So, disregarding the opinions of certain cultivators of science, we are here to ask the more pertinent question, What is there — if indeed there be anything — in the nature of science itself, as science is now known, what is there in its results or in its method, that points to a pantheistic interpretation of the world?

To this question it must in all candour be answered, that both in the method of modern science, and in the two most commanding principles that have resulted from the method, there is that which unquestionably suggests the pantheistic view. Nothing less than the most cautious discrimination,