Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/32

Rh miracles, but it is the wisdom to find in all things, however obscure, or fragmentary, the expressions, however mysterious, of the Divine Love. The faith of the devout does not forewarn them as to the future, nor does it annul the value of worldly prudence; but it makes them glad to suffer, and willing to wait, and sure that however far off God seems, he actually is near. Now what faith accomplishes in the daily practice of the devout, a Theory of Being must also undertake, in so far as it is successful, to provide for us in our efforts to understand Nature and Man.

What we men call Nature comes to us as a matter of our extremely finite common experience. In dealing with nature, we feel our way; we pass from fact to fact; we collect fragments. When our special sciences succeed in joining these fragments into some sort of empirical unity, the procedure is distinctly human, and the result is always provisional. Now no philosophy can predetermine in this realm, either what special facts shall be observed, or what particular hypotheses as to their connection shall first be attempted, or what provisional theories shall prove best adapted to the purpose of any special science. Philosophy is powerless to act as a substitute for special science, precisely as it is powerless to add to the products of the industrial arts. It is as unable to formulate a thesis in the realms properly belonging to physics or to biology as it is to build a steam engine.

And in the same way, when we deal with Man, — with the concrete issues of his daily life, — with the problems of private passion or of public policy, we have to do, primarily, with human nature as it is, and with all the