Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/156

Rh empirical science, confined to Nature as its proper object, can legitimately assert the theory of pantheism?

With regard now, first, to the argument drawn with such apparent force purely from the method of natural science, it will be plain to a more scrutinising reflexion, that shifting from the legitimate disregard of a supersensible Principle — a disregard in which the empirical method is entirely within its right — to the denial or the doubt of it because there is and can be no scientific evidence for it, is in fact an abuse of the scientific method, an unwarrantable extension of it to decisions lying by its own terms beyond its reach. The shift is made upon the assumption that there can be no science — no exact and conclusive knowledge — founded on any but empirical evidence. Now, that there is no science deserving of the name except such as follows the empirical method of natural science is a claim which experts in natural science are rather prone to make; but the profoundest thinkers the world has known — such as Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel — have certainly pronounced the claim unfounded; indeed, a sheer assumption, contradicted by evidence the clearest, if oftentimes abstruse. When instead of blindly following experience we raise the question of the nature and the sources of experience, and push it in earnest, it then