Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/487

462 to the facts, in the discovery of particular laws, science is almighty. To doubt her capacity as highest judge in this field is flagrant contempt of court. Science is just the Infinite Thought as far as it is yet by us realized in the facts of nature. A priori we can realize nothing about finite facts, save that they must be capable of rational comprehension. We know that the Infinite thinks them, and this is all that we know about them. What they are, experience must tell us.

Such then are some of the restrictions imposed upon our thought. We must now consider more carefully how we must treat the scientific postulates that were our only comfort in studying reality before we reached our present insight.

When we postulated that the world must in the best sense satisfy our fundamental intellectual needs, we assumed what is necessary for science, but what science itself does not satisfactorily explain. Have we now reached any foundation for this theoretical postulate? We have in fact reached one. The postulate of science amounts to this, that the real connections among facts must be such as would be rationally comprehensible if they were known. But we have found in fact that all facts not only must be rationally comprehensible, but are rationally comprehended, in and by the one Divine Mind. The postulate of science expresses therefore in part and as a mere assumption, what we now know as a whole, and as a result of demonstration. The unity of the Divine Thought implies that all facts, if we knew them well enough, would appear rationally