Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/63

wind that sighs; the cart or the carriage that rumbles by; yonder dress or paper that rustles; the chair or boot that squeaks; the twinge that one suddenly feels; the confusions of our associative mental process, “fancy unto fancy linking”; the accidents that filled to-day’s newspapers, — of such stuff, I beg you to notice, our immediate experience is naturally made up. The isolating devices of the laboratory, the nightly silence of the lonely observatory, the narrowness of the microscopic field, and, best of all, the control of a fixed and well-trained attention, often greatly diminish, but simply cannot annul, the disorder of this outer and inner chaos. But, on the other hand, all such efforts to secure order rest on the presupposition that this disorder means fragmentariness — random selection from a world of data that our science aims to view indirectly as a world of orderly experience. But even such relative reduction of the chaos as we get never lasts long and continuously in the life of any one person. Your moments of unfragmentary and more scientific experience fill of themselves only fragments of your life. A wandering attention, the interruption of intruding sensations, — such fragments may at any time be ready, by their intrusion, to destroy the orderliness of even the best-equipped scientific experience. The student of science, like other men, knows in fragments, and prophesies in fragments. But — and here we come again in sight of our goal — the world of truth that he wants to know is a world where that which is in part is to be taken away. He calls that the world of an organised experience. But he sees that world as through a