Page:Experience and nature (IA experiencenature00dewe 0).pdf/19

Each way of approach has its advantages and its dangers. Those who are able to pursue the road of that technical and refined knowledge called science are fortunate. But the history of thought shows how easy it is for them to forget that science is after all an art, a matter of perfected skill in conducting inquiry; while it reveals that those who are not directly engaged in the use of this art readily take science to be something finished, absolute in itself, instead of the result of a certain technique. Consequently "scientific" philosophies have over and over again made the science of their own day the premises of philosophy only to have them undermined by later science. And even when reasonably sure foundations are provided by the science of a period, a philosopher has no guarantee save his own acumen and honesty that he will not em- ploy them in such a way as to get lost on a bypath. Professed scientific philosophers have been wont to employ the remoter and refinished products of science in ways which deny, discount or pervert the obvious and immediate facts of gross experience, unmindful that thereby philosophy itself commits suicide.

On the other hand, the method which sets out with macroscopic experience requires unusual candor and patience. The subject-matter of science, for better or worse, is at least "there;" it is a definite body of facts and principles summed up in books and having a kind of independent external existence. But coarse and vital experience is Protean; a thing of moods and tenses. To seize and report it is the task of an artist as well as of an informed technician. As the history of thought shows, the usual thing, a thing so usual as probably to be in some measure inevitable, is for the philosopher to mix with his reports