pated from authority and has set to work to square men's
conscience with history and experience. This theology has generally
passed into speculative idealism, which under another name recognises
the universal empire of law and conceives man's life as an incident in a
prodigious natural process, by which his mind and his interests are
produced and devoured. This "idealism" is in truth a system of
immaterial physics, like that of Pythagoras or Heraclitus. While it
works with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalist
would care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to except
what the naturalist or historian may already have discovered and
expressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is a
translation of physical evolution into mythical language, which
presents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now in
that of a romantic drama. In either case the facts are the same, and
just those which positive knowledge has come upon. Thus many who are not
brought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillingly
and unawares, by their religious speculations.

[Sidenote: Distinction between science and myth.]

The gulf that yawns between such idealistic cosmogonies and a true
physics may serve to make clear the divergence in principle which
everywhere divides natural science from arbitrary conceptions of things.
This divergence is as far as possible from lying in the merit of the two
sorts of theory. Their merit, and the genius and observation required to
frame them, may well be equal, or an imaginative system may have the
advantage in these respects. It may even be more serviceable for a while
and have greater pragmatic value, so long as knowledge is at best
fragmentary, and no consecutive or total view of things is attempted by
either party. Thus in social life a psychology expressed in terms of
abstract faculties and personified passions may well carry a man farther
than a physiological psychology would. Or, again, we may say that there
was more experience and love of nature enshrined in ancient mythology
than in ancient physics; the observant poet might then have fared better
in the world than the pert and ignorant materialist. Nor does the
difference between science and myth lie in the fact that the one is
essentially less speculative than the other. They are differently
speculative, it is true, since myth terminates in unverifiable notions
that might by