what is extraordinarily complex can support
intelligence. Consciousness is essentially incompetent to understand
what most concerns it, its own vicissitudes, and sense is altogether out
of scale with the objects of practical interest in life.

[Sidenote: Science consequently retarded.]

One consequence of this profound maladjustment is that science is hard
to attain and is at first paradoxical. The change of scale required is
violent and frustrates all the mind's rhetorical habits. There is a
constant feeling of strain and much flying back to the mother-tongue of
myth and social symbol. Every wrong hypothesis is seized upon and is
tried before any one will entertain the right one. Enthusiasm for
knowledge is chilled by repeated failures and a great confusion cannot
but reign in philosophy. A man with an eye for characteristic features
in various provinces of experience is encouraged to deal with each upon
a different principle; and where these provinces touch or actually fuse,
he is at a loss what method of comprehension to apply. There sets in,
accordingly, a tendency to use various methods at once or a different
one on each occasion, as language, custom, or presumption seems to
demand. Science is reduced by philosophers to plausible discourse, and
the more plausible the discourse is, by leaning on all the heterogeneous
prejudices of the hour, the more does it foster the same and discourage
radical investigation.

Thus even Aristotle felt that good judgment and the dramatic habit of
things altogether excluded the simple physics of Democritus. Indeed, as
things then stood, Democritus had no right to his simplicity, except
that divine right which comes of inspiration. His was an indefensible
faith in a single radical insight, which happened nevertheless to be
true. To justify that insight forensically it would have been necessary
to change the range of human vision, making it telescopic in one region
and microscopic in another; whereby the objects so transfigured would
have lost their familiar aspect and their habitual context in discourse.
Without such a startling change of focus nature can never seem
everywhere mechanical. Hence, even to this day, people with broad human
interests are apt to discredit a mechanical philosophy. Seldom can
penetration and courage in thinking hold their own against the
miscellaneous habits of discourse; and nobody remembers that moral
values must remain captious, and imaginative life ig