Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/37

 But it is to Ernest Mach, a physicist who has turned philosopher, that we owe the most impressive presentation of this truth. “In reality,” he says, “the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole, but only that aspect of it which is important to us, the rest being either intentionally or from necessity omitted.” If we were capable of that intellectual intuition of which some philosophers have dreamt, there would be no enforced omissions, no intractable residuum, no sundering of ‘that’ and ‘what’ in our knowledge; history would not be left outside science, but rather science be taken up into history. We should not start with the abstract and general, unable to reach the concrete and individual, but being fully acquainted with every individual we should be relieved of the incommensurability of fact and law. Omniscience of this sort would surely bring us nearer to reality than the omniscience of Laplace’s imaginary spirit with its completed world-formula. Order there would needs be in such a world, if it is to be a world at all. But