ulation. If you use such terms--and to forbid their use
altogether would be pedantic--you should take them for conventional
literary expressions, covering an unsolved problem; for these views and
intentions have a brief and inconsequential tenure of life and their
existence is merely a sign for certain conjunctions in nature, where
processes hailing from afar have met in a man, soon to pass beyond him.
If they figure as causes in nature, it is only because they represent
the material processes that have brought them into being. The
existential element in mental facts is not so remote from matter as
Descartes imagined. Even if we are not prepared to admit with Democritus
that matter is what makes them up (as it well might if "matter" were
taken in a logical sense)[B] we should agree that their substance is in
mechanical flux, and that their form, by which they become moral
unities, is only an ideal aspect of that moving substance. Moral
unities are created by a point of view, as right and left are, and for
that reason are not efficacious; though of course the existences they
enclose, like the things lying to the left and to the right, move in
unison with the rest of nature.

People doubtless do well to keep an eye open for morals when they study
physics, and _vice versa_, since it is only by feeling how the two
spheres hang together that the Life of Reason can be made to walk on
both feet. Yet to discriminate between the two is no scholastic
subtlety. There is the same practical inconvenience in taking one for
the other as in trying to gather grapes from thistles. A hybrid science
is sterile. If the reason escapes us, history should at least convince
us of the fact, when we remember the issue of Aristotelian physics and
of cosmological morals. Where the subject-matter is ambiguous and the
method double, you have scarcely reached a result which seems plausible
for the moment, when a rival school springs up, adopting and bringing
forward the submerged element in your view, and rejecting your
achievement altogether. A seesaw and endless controversy thus take the
place of a steady, co-operative advance. This disorder reigns in morals,
metaphysics, and psychology, and the conflicting schools of political
economy and of history loudly proclaim it to the world.

[Sidenote: "Physic of metaphysic begs defence."]

The modesty of men of science, their aversion (or incapacity) to carry
their principles over into speculation, has l