transcribing our terms, when the reckoning is over, into the
language of familiar facts. Were these facts not forthcoming, the
symbolic machinery would itself become the genuine reality--since it is
really given--and we should have to rest in it, as in the ultimate
truth. This is what happens in mythology, when the natural phenomena
expressed by it are forgotten. But natural phenomena themselves are
symbols of nothing, because they are primary data. They are the
constitutive elements of the reality they disclose.

[Sidenote: Science contains all trustworthy knowledge.]

The validity of science in general is accordingly established merely by
establishing the truth of its particular propositions, in dialectic on
the authority of intent and in physics on that of experiment. It is
impossible to base science on a deeper foundation or to override it by a
higher knowledge. What is called metaphysics, if not an anticipation of
natural science, is a confusion of it with dialectic or a mixture of it
with myths. If we have the faculty of being utterly sincere and of
disintegrating the conventions of language and religion, we must confess
that knowledge is only a claim we put forth, a part of that unfathomable
compulsion by force of which we live and hold our painted world together
for a moment. If we have any insight into mind, or any eye for human
history, we must confess at the same time that the oracular substitutes
for knowledge to which, in our perplexities, we might be tempted to
fly, are pathetic popular fables, having no other sanctity than that
which they borrow from the natural impulses they play upon. To live by
science requires intelligence and faith, but not to live by it is folly.

[Sidenote: It suffices for the Life of Reason.]

If science thus contains the sum total of our rational convictions and
gives us the only picture of reality on which we should care to dwell,
we have but to consult the sciences in detail to ascertain, as far as
that is possible, what sort of a universe we live in. The result is as
yet far from satisfactory. The sciences have not joined hands and made
their results coherent, showing nature to be, as it doubtless is, all of
one piece. The moral sciences especially are a mass of confusion.
Negative, I think, must be the attitude of reason, in the present state
of science, upon any hypothesis far outrunning the recorded history and
the visible habitat of the human race. Yet exactly the same