Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/147

86 be, or whence experience can possibly derive this infallibility of evidence, but assumes, on the contrary, that the infallibility of the evidence, could this once be certainly got, is immediate and underived — to such a science it must seem that we can have no verifiable assurance of any existence but the Whole; that is, the aggregate of particulars hitherto actual or yet to become so. Thus the very method of natural science tends to obliterate the sense of the transcendent, of what lies beyond the bounds of possible experience, or at least to destroy its credit at the bar of disciplined judgment. In this way the method brings its too eager votaries to regard the Sum of Things as the only reality.

On this view, the outcome of the scientific method might seem to be restricted to that form of pantheism which I have named atheistic. Most obviously the inference would be directly to materialism, the lowest and most natural form of such pantheism; subtler reasoning, however, recognising that in the last resort experience must be consciousness, sees a truer fulfilment of the empirical method in the subjective idealism which states the Sum of Things as the aggregate of the perceptions of its conscious members. But beyond even this juster idealistic construction of atheistic pantheism — beyond either form of atheistic pantheism, in fact — the method of natural science would appear to involve consequences