cepting and more critically examining the world as it seems revealed
in the experience of the race?

8. SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE.--Still, the knowledge of the world which we
have been discussing is rather indefinite, inaccurate, and
unsystematic. It is a sufficient guide for common life, but its
deficiencies may be made apparent. He who wishes to know matter and
mind better cannot afford to neglect the sciences.

Now, it is important to observe that although, when the plain man grows
scientific, great changes take place in his knowledge of things, yet
his way of looking at the mind and the world remains in general much
what it was before. To prevent this statement from being
misunderstood, I must explain it at some length.

Let us suppose that the man in question takes up the study of botany.
Need he do anything very different from what is done more imperfectly
by every intelligent man who interests himself in plants? There in the
real material world before him are the same plants that he observed
somewhat carelessly before. He must collect his information more
systematically and must arrange it more critically, but his task is not
so much to do something different as it is to do the same thing much
better.

The same is evidently true of various other sciences, such as geology,
zooelogy, physiology, sociology. Some men have much accurate
information regarding rocks, animals, the functions of the bodily
organs, the development of a given form of society, and other things of
the sort, and other men have but little; and yet it is usually not
difficult for the man who knows much to make the man who knows little
understand, at least, what he is talking about. He is busying himself
with _things_--the same things that interest the plain man, and of
which the plain man knows something. He has collected information
touching their properties, their changes, their relationships; but to
him, as to his less scientific neighbor, they are the same things they
always were,--things that he has known from the days of childhood.

Perhaps it will be admitted that this is true of such sciences as those
above indicated, but doubted whether it is true of all the sciences,
even of all the sciences which are directly concerned with _things_ of
_some_ sort. For example, to the plain man the world of material
things consists of things that can be seen and touched. Many of these
seem to fill space continuously. They may be divided, but