s substance or
to its force.

The situation so created gave the literary philosophers an excellent
chance to return to the attack and to swallow and digest the new-born
mechanism in their facile systems. Theologians and metaphysicians in one
quarter and psychologists in another found it easy and inevitable to
treat the whole mechanical world as a mere idea. In that case, it is
true, the only existences that remained remained entirely without
calculable connections; everything was a divine trance or a shower of
ideas falling by chance through the void. But this result might not be
unwelcome. It fell in well enough with that love of emotional issues,
that want of soberness and want of cogency, which is so characteristic
of modern philosophers. Christian theology still remained the background
and chief point of reference for speculation; if its eclectic dogmas
could be in part supported or in part undermined, that constituted a
sufficient literary success, and what became of science was of little
moment in comparison.

[Sidenote: Men of science not speculative.]

Science, to be sure, could very well take care of itself and proceeded
in its patient course without caring particularly what status the
metaphysicians might assign to it. Not to be a philosopher is even an
advantage for a man of science, because he is then more willing to adapt
his methods to the state of knowledge in his particular subject, without
insisting on ultimate intelligibility; and he has perhaps more joy of
his discoveries than he might have if he had discounted them in his
speculations. Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newton
to prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believing
that it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In natural
history, observation has not yet come within range of accurate
processes; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations.
Even in chemistry, while measure and proportion are better felt, the
ultimate units and the radical laws are still problematical. The recent
immense advances in science have been in acquaintance with nature rather
than in insight. Greater complexity, greater regularity, greater
_naturalness_ have been discovered everywhere; the profound analogies in
things, their common evolution, have appeared unmistakably; but the
inner texture of the process has not been laid bare.

This cautious peripheral attack, which does so much honour to the
sc