Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/158

Rh the region of sensible and experimental facts into the empirically unknown, empirically unattested, empirically unwarranted region of supersensible principles. The exact scientific truth about all such inferences, and the supposed realities which they establish or displace, is simply that they are not warranted by natural science; and that this withholding of warrant is only the expression by natural science of its incompetency to enter upon such questions.

Natural science must therefore, in truth, be declared silent on this question of pantheism; as indeed it is, and from the nature of the case must be, upon all theories of the supersensible alike — theistic, deistic, atheistic, pantheistic. Natural science has no proper concern with such theories. Science may well enough be said to be non-pantheistic, but so also is it non-theistic, non-deistic, non-atheistic. Its position, however, is not for that reason anti-pantheistic, any more than it is anti-theistic, or anti-deistic, or anti-atheistic. Rather, it is merely agnostic; not in the sense of the dogmatic philosophies of agnosticism, but simply in the sense of declining to affect knowledge in the premises, seeing they are beyond its method and its province. In short, its agnosticism is simply its neutrality, and doesn’t in the least imply that agnosticism is the final view of things. The investigation of the final view, the research concerning the First Principle, science leaves to methods