still be
trusted and pursued by the prophet of redemption. In the second place
the intuition thus gained and exclusively put forward must be made the
starting-point for a restored natural morality. Otherwise the faith
appealed to would be worthless in its operation, as well as fanciful in
its basis, and it could never become a mould for thought or action in a
civilised society.

CHAPTER XI

THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE

The same despair or confusion which, when it overtakes human purposes,
seeks relief in arbitrary schemes of salvation, when it overtakes human
knowledge, may breed arbitrary substitutes for science. There are
post-rational systems of nature as well as of duty. Most of these are
myths hardly worth separating from the post-rational moralities they
adorn, and have been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter; but a few
aspire to be critical revisions of science, themselves scientific. It
may be well, in bringing this book to a close, to review these proposed
revisions. The validity of science is at stake, and with it the validity
of that whole Life of Reason which science crowns, and justifies to
reflection.

[Sidenote: Various modes of revising science.]

There are many degrees and kinds of this critical retractation. Science
may be accepted bodily, while its present results are modified by
suggesting speculatively what its ultimate results might be. This is
natural philosophy or legitimate metaphysics. Or science may be accepted
in part, and in part subjected to control by some other alleged vehicle
of knowledge. This is traditional or intuitive theology. Or science may
be retracted and withdrawn altogether, on the ground that it is but
methodological fiction, its facts appearances merely, and its principles
tendencies to feign. This is transcendentalism; whereupon a dilemma
presents itself. We may be invited to abstain from all hypostasis or
hearty belief in anything, and to dwell only on the consciousness of
imaginative activity in a vacuum--which is radical idealism. Or we may
be assured that, science being a dream, we may awake from it into
another cosmos, built upon principles quite alien to those illustrated
in nature or applicable in practice--which is idealism of the mythical
sort. Finally it may occur to us that the criticism of science is an
integral part of science itself, and that a transcendental method of
survey, which marshals all things in the order of their discovery, far
from