ntellectual, just as
science is; that is, it would have to be practical and to survey the
flux from a given standpoint, in a perspective determined by special and
local interests. Otherwise the whole world, when known, would merely be
re-enacted in its blind immediacy without being understood or subjected
to any purpose. The critics of science, when endowed with any
speculative power, have always seen that what is hypothetical and
abstract in scientific method is somehow servile and provisional;
science being a sort of telegraphic wire through which a meagre report
reaches us of things we would fain observe and live through in their
full reality. This report may suffice for approximately fit action; it
does not suffice for ideal knowledge of the truth nor for adequate
sympathy with the reality. What commonly escapes speculative critics of
science, however, is that in transcending hypothesis and reaching
immediacy again we should run a great risk of abandoning knowledge and
sympathy altogether; for if we _became_ what we now represent so
imperfectly, we should evidently no longer represent it at all. We
should not, at the end of our labours, have at all enriched our own
minds by adequate knowledge of what surrounds us, nor made our wills
just in view of alien but well-considered interests. We should have lost
our own essence and substituted for it, not something higher than
indiscriminate being, but only indiscriminate being in its flat, blind,
and selfish infinity. The ideality, the representative faculty, would
have gone out in our souls, and our perfected humanity would have
brought us back to protoplasm.

In transcending science, therefore, we must not hope to transcend
knowledge, nor in transcending selfishness to abolish finitude. Finitude
is the indispensable condition of unselfishness as well as of
selfishness, and of speculative vision no less than of hypothetical
knowledge. The defect of science is that it is inadequate or abstract,
that the account it gives of things is not full and sensuous enough; but
its merit is that, like sense, it makes external being present to a
creature that is concerned in adjusting itself to its environment, and
informs that creature about things other than itself. Science, if
brought to perfection, would not lose its representative or ideal
essence. It would still survey and inform, but it would survey
everything at once and inform the being it enlightened about all that
could aff