Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/225

200 cation, of description, of experiment, and of prediction, which are as material in their embodiment as the works of an industrial art. While science deals with natural facts in a far more universal way than does any industrial art, its purposes are no less human than are those of its fellow. Both coöperate to the end of man’s mastery over Nature. Both succeed by selection from the mass of materials offered, by rearrangement of what is found, and by skill in adjustment.

And, therefore, both give us much the same sort of right to speculate as to Nature’s inner constitution. Both involve the same sort of relatively narrow clearness as to just our human place in the mists of finite experience. Both indicate a truth that is in some sense valid beyond ourselves. Both have essentially the same kind of limitation when we undertake to view them as revelations of what that truth in itself is and implies.

But we have long since given up assuming that the success of our industrial art is, by itself, any sufficient revelation of the innermost nature of things. It does not now occur to us to say that Nature exists, apart from man, as a mere storehouse of materials for the contrivances of our industrial art, — for example, as a collection of banks of good clay for the potters, or (to use the example that Hegel cited) as a storehouse of good corks for our bottles. A certain simple-minded teleology used indeed often to view Nature in very much this trivial way. The coal measures were especially prepared for man’s use. The metals were preordained for his forges and furnaces, for his machines, and for his ornaments and his money. The animals grew to