ect its interests. It would thus remain practical in effect and
speculative in character. In losing its accidental limitations it would
not lose its initial bias, its vital function. It would continue to be a
rational activity, guiding and perfecting a natural being.

Perfect knowledge of things would be as far as possible from identifying
the knower with them, seeing that for the most part--even when we call
them human--they have no knowledge of themselves. Science, accordingly,
even when imperfect, is a tremendous advance on absorption in sense and
a dull immediacy. It begins to enrich the mind and gives it some
inkling, at least, of that ideal dominion which each centre of
experience might have if it had learned to regard all others, and the
relation connecting it with them, both in thought and in action. Ideal
knowledge would be an inward state corresponding to a perfect
adjustment of the body to all forces affecting it. If the adjustment was
perfect the inward state would regard every detail in the objects
envisaged, but it would see those details in a perspective of its own,
adding to sympathetic reproduction of them a consciousness of their
relation to its own existence and perfection.

[Sidenote: Unity of science.]

The fact that science expresses the character and relation of objects in
their own terms has a further important consequence, which serves again
to distinguish science from metaphorical thinking. If a man tries to
illustrate the nature of a thing by assimilating it to something else
which he happens to have in mind at the same time, it is obvious that a
second man, whose mind is differently furnished, may assimilate the same
object to a quite different idea: so myths are centrifugal, and the more
elaborate and delicate they are the more they diverge, like
well-developed languages. The rude beginnings of myth in every age and
country bear a certain resemblance, because the facts interpreted are
similar and the minds reading them have not yet developed their special
grammar of representation. But two highly developed mythical
systems--two theologies, for instance, like the Greek and the
Indian--will grow every day farther and farther apart. Science, on the
contrary, whatever it may start with, runs back into the same circle of
facts, because it follows the lead of the subject-matter, and is
attentive to its inherent transformations.

If men's fund of initial perceptions, then, is alike, their scienc