under examination. Thus natural science climbs its slow and cautious way along the path of what it calls the laws of Nature; but it only gives this name in the sense that there has been a constancy in the conjunctions of past experience, a verification of the tentative generalisation suggested by this, and a consequent continuance of the same tentative expectancy. This expectancy, however, waits for renewed verification, and refrains from committing itself unreservedly to the absolute invariability of the law to which it refers. Unconditional universality of its ascertained conjunctions, natural science, in its own sphere and function, neither claims nor admits; and a fortiori not their necessity.[1]
Now, to a science which accepts the testimony of experience with this undoubting and instinctive confidence that never stops to inquire what the real grounds of the possibility of experience itself may
- ↑ The account here given of scientific method may appear to some readers different from that presented in the essay on “The Limits of Evolution” (see pp. 33-36). There is no real inconsistency between the two, however. Here, I am stating the method of science strictly as such — stating it as the scientific expert uses it and states it to himself. In the former place, I was stating the philosophy of the method — bringing out its real presuppositions. I was representing the method, not simply with reference to its practical objects, not purely as a means to a result in science, but as a step in the theory of knowledge, a link in the chain not of science but of philosophy. Nor does the above-mentioned holding-back of science from necessity in its judgments mean anything but its just recognition of the unavoidable insecurity of its basis of fact.
