Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/157

96 appears that the experience which seems so rigorously to exclude supersensible principles, and particularly the personality of the First Principle, is itself dependent for its existence on a personal Principle and on supersensible principles; that, in fact, these enter into the very constitution of experience. But in any case this question of the nature of experience and the limits of knowledge — the question whether the limits of knowledge are identical with the limits of experience — is a question which if we take up, we abandon the field of natural science, and enter instead the field of the theory of cognition. In this, the expert at natural science, as such, has not a word to say. Here his method is altogether unavailing. If the problem can be solved at all, the solution will be by methods that transcend the bounds of empirical evidence. The scientific expert may be competent to the solution in his capacity of man, but in his capacity of man of science he certainly is not.

So again, with regard to the inferences to pantheism from the conservation of energy and the principle of evolution. Strong as the evidence seems, it arises in both cases from violating the strict principles of the scientific method. All inferences to a Whole of potential energy, or to a Whole determinant of the survivals in a struggle for existence, are real inferences — cases of passing beyond