Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/146

Rh under examination. Thus natural science climbs its slow and cautious way along the path of what it calls the laws of Nature; but it only gives this name in the sense that there has been a constancy in the conjunctions of past experience, a verification of the tentative generalisation suggested by this, and a consequent continuance of the same tentative expectancy. This expectancy, however, waits for renewed verification, and refrains from committing itself unreservedly to the absolute invariability of the law to which it refers. Unconditional universality of its ascertained conjunctions, natural science, in its own sphere and function, neither claims nor admits; and a fortiori not their necessity. Now, to a science which accepts the testimony of experience with this undoubting and instinctive confidence that never stops to inquire what the real grounds of the possibility of experience itself may