Thus, a religious doctrine is tested by the moral experience of innumerable individuals, and also by its effect upon society through generations, and also by its consonance with a vast number of other observed things, small and great.
There is here, to use a mathematical metaphor, integration. Certitude comes from the integration of an indefinitely great number of differentials. It is in this way that we have certitude of a personality, of a voice, of a type. We see an elm tree half a mile away, and say, “That is an elm tree,” although if we could set down exactly what it is we see, the indications would seem quite insufficient for so certain a conclusion. What we see is but a vague blotch, but we read into it, from an indefinitely large number of slight indications, what we have always known nearer by for an elm tree.
This kind of belief stands on the broadest base, even when it deals with things not appreciable to our senses (for instance, the ancient Western doctrine of immortality). But the affirmations of the sort called today “scientific,” are balanced upon a point. The apparent proof of them lies along a narrow chain, every link of which, behind the first physical appreciation of the senses, depends upon a number of postulates, each capable of breaking down under some new consideration.
For instance, our senses tell us, and we know, that if you mix two known substances in a certain fashion, and in a certain proportion, say two portions by weight of the one and four portions by weight of the other, they will disappear, and a third totally different thing will appear in their stead. That is what happens when you try any one of a thousand chemical experiments. It is what happens when an electric spark is passed through a certain mixture of oxygen and hydrogen under certain conditions. We know that with the same conditions, and the same proportionate weights this astonishing thing takes place: the substitution of a third totally different thing for the two things which have disappeared: all that remains being the combined weight, which does not change. We also know that, under suitable conditions, the new third thing, totally different from the two original things it has supplanted, will disappear, and the two original things will reappear; and we know that the combined weights of the first two, and the weight of the third thing which takes their place, are the same. All that is real knowledge, definite, proved and certain science, in the old and exact sense of the word “science”—which signifies a sort of knowledge depending upon proof so conclusive that the human reason cannot admit the possibility of the opposite.
We further know that when we repeat these conditions a dozen, or a myriad times, the same results appear, as in the case of any other natural sequence in the physical world; as in the case of a stone falling from a height, or a sound following from a blow. On such knowledge we erect an hypothesis, we say that the mysterious substitution of a third totally different thing for the first two, but the maintenance of an equal weight throughout, can only on the analogy of our other experience be explained by the constitution of matter in certain ultimate particles which we call “atoms”; for, as it seems to our very limited imaginations, if that be not the ultimate constitution of matter, the only other way in which the thing can take place, the only other way imaginable to us—that is, capable of being presented to our minds as a picture—is a transformation through the mere effect of number, a certain magic in number having some inherent power to affect the modes of what we call “matter.”
But as the former concept—that of the atom—is mechanical, and easy to picture, while the latter is highly mysterious, escapes measurement, and involves qualities which we do not today associate with any inherent power of number, we accept the first hypothesis. We assume—we do not prove—that matter consists thus of atoms.
Granted that hypothesis, we can give the measurement of the supposed atom, and investigate its qualities. But having begun with an hypothesis, each new stage of investigation depends on a further hypothesis: a second built on the first, a third on the second, and so on—till you get to the exceedingly hypothetical electron. Strictly speaking, pure science stops at the first phenomenon ascertainable by the senses—the change of two into a third and of the third back into the two. All the rest is but a scaffolding of presumptions built upon the supposed nature of that change. It has not attaching to it proof so conclusive that the possibility of an opposite cannot be imagined. It is not science.
It is, further, true that with each stage in hypothesis the element of probability, however high, is less than it was in the last stage; the tenth of ten successive guesses, each reposing on the last, is less secure than the ninth; the ninth than the eighth.
But the academies do not grasp this evident truth; they live by imaginaries, which they affirm to be things; and that is why one of the wisest of the moderns launched that decisive phrase, “the bankruptcy of science”: that is the bankruptcy of the promises advanced by false modern science.
The great Ferrero quarrels with that famous phrase. Yet he himself has written one more damning; for he writes: “The men of the nineteenth century thought they knew everything, and they knew nothing.”
The harbours of that coast between Torbay and Portland I do not sufficiently know. I have never entered Teignmouth, in spite of the lyrical invitation to its beauties which is set like a gem in the “Channel Pilot.” I have never attempted the shallow bar of Exmouth.
Bridport Haven I only entered once, with several companions in a crowded boat. Never was I more fascinated by any little haven, for it has the delightful qualities of
