nstance, once noted, is
thrown aside like a squeezed orange, its significance in establishing
some law having once been extracted. Science, by this flight into the
general, lends immediate experience an interest and scope which its
parts, taken blindly, could never possess; since if we remained sunk in
the moments of existence and never abstracted their character from their
presence, we should never know that they had any relation to one
another. We should feel their incubus without being able to distinguish
their dignities or to give them names. By analysing what we find and
abstracting what recurs from its many vain incidents we can discover a
sustained structure within, which enables us to foretell what we may
find in future. Science thus articulates experience and reveals its
skeleton.

Skeletons are not things particularly congenial to poets, unless it be
for the sake of having something truly horrible to shudder at and to
frighten children with: and so a certain school of philosophers exhaust
their rhetoric in convincing us that the objects known to science are
artificial and dead, while the living reality is infinitely rich and
absolutely unutterable. This is merely an ungracious way of describing
the office of thought and bearing witness to its necessity. A body is
none the worse for having some bones in it, even if they are not all
visible on the surface. They are certainly not the whole man, who
nevertheless runs and leaps by their leverage and smooth turning in
their sockets; and a surgeon's studies in dead anatomy help him
excellently to set a living joint. The abstractions of science are
extractions of truths. Truths cannot of themselves constitute existence
with its irrational concentration in time, place, and person, its
hopeless flux, and its vital exuberance; but they can be true of
existence; they can disclose that structure by which its parts cohere
materially and become ideally inferable from one another.

[Sidenote: Looser principles tried first.]

Science becomes demonstrable in proportion as it becomes abstract. It
becomes in the same measure applicable and useful, as mathematics
witnesses, whenever the abstraction is judiciously made and has seized
the profounder structural features in the phenomenon. These features are
often hard for human eyes to discern, buried as they may be in the
internal infinitesimal texture of things. Things accordingly seem to
move on the world's stage in an unaccoun