ientific army and has won it so many useful victories, is another
proof that science is nothing but common knowledge extended. It is
willing to reckon in any terms and to study any subject-matter; where it
cannot see necessity it will notice law; where laws cannot be stated it
will describe habits; where habits fail it will classify types; and
where types even are indiscernible it will not despise statistics. In
this way studies which are scientific in spirit, however loose their
results, may be carried on in social matters, in political economy, in
anthropology, in psychology. The historical sciences, also, philology
and archaeology, have reached tentatively very important results; it is
enough that an intelligent man should gather in any quarter a rich fund
of information, for the movement of his subject to pass somehow to his
mind: and if his apprehension follows that movement--not breaking in
upon it with extraneous matter--it will be scientific apprehension.

[Sidenote: Confusion in semi-moral subjects.]

What confuses and retards science in these ambiguous regions is the
difficulty of getting rid of the foreign element, or even of deciding
what the element native to the object is. In political economy, for
instance, it is far from clear whether the subject is moral, and
therefore to be studied and expressed dialectically, or whether it is
descriptive, and so in the end a matter of facts and of mechanics. Are
you formulating an interest or tracing a sequence of events? And if both
simultaneously, are you studying the world in order to see what acts, in
a given situation, would serve your purpose and so be right, or are you
taking note of your own intentions, and of those of other people, in
order to infer from them the probable course of affairs? In the first
case you are a moralist observing nature in order to use it; you are
defining a policy, and that definition is not knowledge of anything
except of your own heart. Neither you nor any one else may ever take
such a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one you
are excogitating. No one may ever have been guided in the past by any
such absolute plan.

For this same reason, if (to take up the other supposition) you are a
naturalist studying the actual movement of affairs, you would do well
not to rely on the conscious views or intentions of anybody. A natural
philosopher is on dangerous ground when he uses psychological or moral
terms in his calc