ndividuality tells for more and
more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize
about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be
that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That
concisely is the minority belief, and my belief.

Now what is called the scientific method in the physical sciences
rests upon the ignoring of individualities; and like many mathematical
conventions, its great practical convenience is no proof whatever of its
final truth. Let me admit the enormous value, the wonder of its results
in mechanics, in all the physical sciences, in chemistry, even in
physiology,--but what is its value beyond that? Is the scientific method
of value in biology? The great advances made by Darwin and his school in
biology were not made, it must be remembered, by the scientific method,
as it is generally conceived, at all. His was historical research.
He conducted research into pre-documentary history. He collected
information along the lines indicated by certain interrogations; and the
bulk of his work was the digesting and critical analysis of that. For
documents and monuments he had fossils and anatomical structures and
germinating eggs too innocent to lie. But, on the other hand, he had
to correspond with breeders and travellers of various sorts; classes
entirely analogous, from the point of view of evidence, to the
writers of history and memoirs. I question profoundly whether the
word "science," in current usage anyhow, ever means such patient
disentanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the attainment of something
positive and emphatic in the way of a conclusion, based on amply
repeated experiments capable of infinite repetition, "proved," as they
say, "up to the hilt."

It would be of course possible to dispute whether the word "science"
should convey this quality of certitude, but to most people it certainly
does at the present time. So far as the movements of comets and electric
trams go, there is no doubt practically cock-sure science; and Comte
and Herbert Spencer seem to me to have believed that cock-sure could
be extended to every conceivable finite thing. The fact that Herbert
Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the
non-individualizing quality of his primary assumptions and of his mental
texture. He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an
evolutionary product from an original homogeneity, beg