intellectual development. Neither our sensible organs, nor our intellect could attain their normal development if there were an incompatibility between human mind and the external world, if our previsions, based on undeniable observations, led us to untrue conclusions with regard to similar observations. If science is power, it is because our reason, in its attempt to comprehend nature, gives us thereby the necessary means to act on it. We are therefore convinced that the universe has its laws and that we are able to penetrate them; we are convinced that the external world cannot change its laws, in the same way as we cannot change the laws of thought; we feel, so to speak, that Reality binds us with it, in an insuperable circle.

In this stage of reflection, the thinker has to face a last aspect of the problem, which is by far the most alarming. If the alliance between mathematics and physics is undeniable, does science explain things as they are? Are science and reality identical? The great physicist, Duhem, denied that science can explain everything. For him, a physical theory is but an attempt towards a symbolic representation of Reality, and not an explanatory inquiry about the real. "A physical theory," he states, "is an abstract system which sums up and classifies logically a group of experimental laws, without pretending to explain them."* An eminent mathematician and philosopher, Professor Le Roy, goes further, when he says that not only physical theories are symbolic and conventional, but that scientific facts themselves are mere creations of our mind. For him, science is made up of conventions, whence its apparent truth. But scientific facts, and a fortiori scientific laws, are artificial creations of the scientist himself. Science, therefore, cannot teach us anything about reality; it can only be used as a rule of action.

We could hardly expect any other from a distinguished follower of Bergson. Yet at the same time we maintain that it

* Duhem, La Théorie Physique: Sa Structure.

is impossible for science to be anti-intellectualistic: science must be intellectualistic, or it will not be at all. We take science as a logical classification of facts, as a means of putting together certain observations which are apparently separated, although they are really linked by some hidden but natural necessity. But a logical classification is an explanation by the natural causes; because its object is not to reveal to us any order in ̧ nature, save the order existing in things, the intimate relations between objects of reality; if possible the plan of nature itself. It is not the privilege of reason to create physical laws, but only to utilize them when discovered. We cannot pretend however, that science gives us the comprehension of the true essence of things. If we get every day nearer and nearer to the knowledge of reality, we must confess at the same time, that we are still, with respect to the ultimate mechanism of things, in the position of an engineer towards a machine of which a few organs only are visible, the remainder being still inaccessible to him. The reason of our ignorance is simple: it is the materiality of human means of perception, which hinders our comprehension of the ultimate nature of things. Besides, whatever has relations to things distinct from itself, could not be what it is, if those different things did not exist; and therefore we cannot know a thing as it is, unless we know all its relations to all the other things in the universe. We cannot hope then to penetrate adequately the essence of things, although we must be convinced, with the great mineralogist Lapparent, that science progresses by successive approximations towards an adequate explanation of the relations between sensible things. Scientific certitude may be considered as asymptotic, because of the hypothetical character of scientific theories. Science and reality are not, therefore, congruent: the evolution of our knowledge and the nature of things are in the relation of a science-curve to its reality-asymptote.

But at the same time, we must acknowledge that every day

we make a new conquest over the unknown, which remains for us a definite acquisition. Although scientific theories cannot be looked upon as an adequate knowledge of Nature, because Reality is necessarily refracted by the mental factors of our general constructions, yet our knowledge of particular facts and even of limited groups of facts related between themselves, can be materially true, independently of the scientific theories with which they may agree. If then, the evolution of the various physical theories from the early Greek philosophers up to the present day seems to prove a constant failure of theoretical science, we must realize that, amongst what are considered to be ruins in an old physical theory, there remains a certain invariant which makes the very value of the new theories. Light, for instance, is subject to gravitation; Newton knew it and gave the figures for the deflection of rays of light grazing the sun. Einstein, by means of a new theory, corrects Newton's formula, as we know. But whatever be the exact amount of that deflection, whatever be the primitive assumptions of the theories predicting that deflection, the fact is there; the deflection of the rays of light grazing the sun is an invariant which subsists whatever be the fortune of the physical systems which try to account for it. So, by calling a fact "desoxydation" or "phlogistication" we do not change the fact as such: its expression only is altered. The same again, we may call a geometrical entity a "Euclidian circumference" or a "Riemannian straight line" in the antipodal system, without altering its very nature. In other words, the essence of a thing does not change when its meaning is expressed in English, in French or in German.

We do not go, however, as far as to say that science is a well-made language, as Locke contends; for us, science is not only a nominalistic system of coherent relations between indefinables, but the expression of true relations between real objects. Sensible things, for which the word "object" has been invented, are really objects and not fugitive and unseizable appearances. When we ask then what is the value of science,

we do not mean does science enable us to comprehend the very essence of things, but does it enable us to understand the true relations of things? And science has lived long enough to prove the stability of its particular constructions. As Poincaré says, through the evolution of scientific systems, there is something which is always there, always present, definitely acquired, and that something is the essential.

It could not be otherwise. For changes do not happen in the laws of nature or in natural facts, but in the way in which we conceive and express them. Reality is immutable; our interpretations of it are, however, conditioned by the necessity and the adequacy of the data on which we base our solutions. One may argue here that, if the world is rational, we ought not to make mistakes in the expression of its laws. But if we know thoroughly the laws of our mind, we are not quite sure about the laws of nature. The materiality of our being is an obstacle to our immediate knowledge of things as they are. We have to reason first about appearances, and, naturally, commit errors. Our convictions, even reasoned, are not a sufficient guarantee of truth.

We conclude, then, by saying, that science has a value independently of our reason. The reality of the external world is certainly independent of the eyes which see it, of the hands which touch it, of thought itself. Reality is not created in and by empirical experience; it exists ready-made outside and prior to experience. In that sense, we can say that the content of science is reality. So that if, per impossibile, mankind were annihilated, science would undoubtedly disappear as such. But its content would still be there; nature would continue its performance according to the same laws; the spectators only would be missing.

Meeting of the Aristotelian Society at 21, Gower Street, W.C. 1,

on July 3rd, 1922, at 8 P.M.

XII. BENEDETTO CROCE'S "HISTORIOGRAPHY."

By DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

I.

IN Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit," as it appears to me, the West looks the East full in the face and then deliberately turns its back. Life is Reality lived as traditionally it has been lived in Europe during historical time. The mystical Reality of the Vedanta and other Indian systems is the illusion. This point of view finds expression in the work on the nature of History and of History writing now before us, where it is maintained that History is equal to Philosophy and identical with it, as the universal is identical with the particular.

What is the chief problem of modern philosophy? Surely it is that of solving the dualism between nature and spirit, between the known and the unknown, between subjective and objective reality. But the dualism seems often to persist. With Bergson, for instance, the vital impulse is left standing side by side with life and leads to a dualism, and in this respect he appears to step backward behind Hegel, who at any rate sought the constant surpassing of the fact by the act in the logical synthesis of his categories.

Croce and Gentile-for to his long discussions with Gentile Croce has said that we owe the original conception of the identity of Philosophy and History, afterwards worked out and much developed in the present volume-regard the concretions of reality as being all comprised in the act of the spirit, which knows nothing but itself, includes within itself its whole history, which is divine history, realizing in the expression of

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