Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/144

Rh founded on a precise knowledge of the history of philosophical inquiry, can detect the exact reach, the limits, and the real significance of this suggestion, or expose the illegitimacy of following it without reserve. The trait to which I am now referring in the method of science is its rigorously observational and experimental character; indeed, its strictly empirical or tentative character. The two commanding results, which now in turn play an organising part in the subsidiary methods of all the sciences, are (1) the principle of the Conservation of Energy, and (2) the principle of Evolution, manifesting itself in the concomitant phenomenon of “natural selection” — the “struggle for existence” between each species or individual and its environment, and the “survival of the fittest.” In these two principles, and also in the general method of science, there are certain implications that seem to point strongly in the pantheistic direction. These implications accordingly deserve, and must receive, our careful attention.

How, then, docs the experimental — or, more accurately, the empirical — method of science suggest the doctrine of pantheism? I answer: By limiting our serious belief to the evidence of experience, and chiefly to the evidence of the senses. The method of science demands that nothing shall receive the high credence accorded to science unless it is attested