chance represent actual existences; while science
terminates in concepts or laws, themselves not possibly existent, but
verified by recurring particular facts, belonging to the same experience
as those from which the theory started.

[Sidenote: Platonic status of hypothesis.]

The laws formulated by science--the transitive figments describing the
relation between fact and fact--possess only a Platonic sort of reality.
They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they
are more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time
they are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible
with immediacy and alien to brute existence. In declaring what is true
of existences they altogether renounce existence on their own behalf.
This situation has made no end of trouble in ill-balanced minds, not
docile to the diversities and free complexity of things, but bent on
treating everything by a single method. They have asked themselves
persistently the confusing question whether the matter or the form of
things is the reality; whereas, of course, both elements are needed,
each with its incommensurable kind of being. The material element alone
is existent, while the ideal element is the sum of all those
propositions which are true of what exists materially. Anybody's
_knowledge_ of the truth, being a complex and fleeting feeling, is of
course but a moment of existence or material being, which whether found
in God or man is as far as possible from being that truth itself which
it may succeed in knowing.

[Sidenote: Meaning of verification.]

The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when
we say that science alone is capable of verification. Some ambiguity,
however, lurks in this phrase, since verification comes to a method only
vicariously, when the particulars it prophesies are realised in sense.
To verify a theory as if it were not a method but a divination of occult
existences would be to turn the theory into a myth and then to discover
that what the myth pictured had, by a miracle, an actual existence also.
There is accordingly a sense in which myth admits substantiation of a
kind that science excludes. The Olympic hierarchy might conceivably
exist bodily; but gravitation and natural selection, being schemes of
relation, can never exist substantially and on their own behoof.
Nevertheless, the Olympic hierarchy, even if it happened to exist, could
not be proved