Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/229

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NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER

of our experience. It is our interest in social organization that has given us both industrial art and empirical science. As industrial art regards its facts as mere contrivances that have no life of their own, but that merely express their human artificer’s intents, so a philosophy of Nature, founded solely upon our special sciences, tends to treat the facts of Nature (regarded in the light of our cunningly contrived conceptions) as having no inner meaning, and as being mere embodiments of our formulas. Both doctrines are perfectly justified as expressions of the perspective view of Nature which we men naturally take. Neither view can stand against any deeper reason that we may have for interpreting our experiences of Nature as a hint of a vaster realm of life and of meaning of which we men form a part, and of which the final unity is in God’s life.