d lures the reader away
from actualities in order to present him with realities. It is of
prime importance, in our present study, therefore, that we should
understand at the very outset the relation between fact and truth, the
distinction between the actual and the real.

A fact is a specific manifestation of a general law: this general law
is the truth because of which that fact has come to be. It is a fact
that when an apple-tree is shaken by the wind, such apples as may
be loosened from their twigs fall to the ground: it is a truth that
bodies in space attract each other with a force that varies inversely
as the square of the distance between them. Fact is concrete, and is
a matter of physical experience: truth is abstract, and is a matter
of mental theory. Actuality is the realm of fact, reality the realm of
truth. The universe as we apprehend it with our senses is actual; the
laws of the universe as we comprehend them with our understanding are
real.

All human science is an endeavor to discover the truths which underlie
the facts that we perceive: all human philosophy is an endeavor to
understand and to appraise those truths when once they are discovered:
and all human art is an endeavor to utter them clearly and effectively
when once they are appraised and understood. The history of man is
the history of a constant and continuous seeking for the truth. Amazed
before a universe of facts, he has striven earnestly to discover the
truth which underlies them,--striven heroically to understand the
large reality of which the actual is but a sensuously perceptible
embodiment. In the earliest centuries of recorded thought the search
was unmethodical; truth was apprehended, if at all, by intuition, and
announced as dogma: but in modern centuries certain regular methods
have been devised to guide the search. The modern scientist begins
his work by collecting a large number of apparently related facts and
arranging them in an orderly manner. He then proceeds to induce from
the observation of these facts an apprehension of the general law that
explains their relation. This hypothesis is then tested in the light
of further facts, until it seems so incontestable that the minds of
men accept it as the truth. The scientist then formulates it in an
abstract theoretic statement, and thus concludes his work.

But it is at just this point that the philosopher begins. Accepting
many truths from many scientists, the philosopher comp