biology and psychology. Whether the acceptance was wise, and whether economy of thought may not be paid for too dearly, are questions beside our immediate point. What we have to note is this: that to systematize the facts of science, by any principle immanent or external, is to bring logic to bear upon them, to arrange them in the light of those logical laws which the experience of the race has tested and found secure, and which therefore form the stock-in-trade of a beginning theory of knowledge. We proceed, says Bacon, "by observing or by meditating on facts"; "to the formation of a science," writes Whewell, "two things are requisite,—Facts and Ideas; observation of Things without, and an inward effort of Thought"; and Huxley demands for a science "scientific observation" and "scientific reasoning." Science, that is to say, in the meaning of a scientific system, is the outcome of scientific activity ordered by logic.
It is only, be it remarked, when we thus consider science as a system, that we can at all subscribe to Huxley's definition of science as "organized" or "perfected common sense." Scientific activity is almost the antipodes of common sense. For science is disinterested, and common sense is self-centered; science is observational, while "there is not one person in a hundred who can describe the commonest occurrence with even an approach to accuracy "; and science is analytical, while common sense, as Huxley shows by reference to "the natural object Water," is content with gross appearance and total function. Common sense is the average man's intellectual modus vivendi; and the one practicable bridge that connects it with science is the bridge of logic; the average man is, in his own way, a very Aristotle. Were that bridge to fall, the definition would be impossible; we should have merely the occasional instances in which the points of view of science and of common sense coincide,—limiting cases, too few to provide even stepping-stones from the one to the other.
Science, therefore, may mean two things, scientific activity and the scientific system; and this twofold meaning is a fertile source of confusion. There is always the danger, for instance, that logic, which is a good servant, become the master,—as it does when Pearson tells us that the goal of science is "nothing short of a complete interpretation of the universe." Science, as scientific activity, aims at no goal; even the phrase "pursuit of truth," useful and inevitable as it may be, may also be misleading; science is, in strictness, only self-directed upon an endless task. So the result of scientific activity is not an interpretation, in any pregnant sense of that term, but only a transcription of the world of human experience as it appears from a certain point of view. Science, in Pearson's formula, thus stands for the system of science; and the system in turn is made to stand, not only for the outcome of scientific activity as worked over by an accepted theory of knowledge,
