The peculiar method of Science is now clear to us, and can be abundantly illustrated from modern results. Our experience consists in sensations, we feel the weight of heavy bodies, we see them fall when let go, we have sensations of heat and cold, light and darkness, and so forth. But these sensations are more or less local and variable from man to man, and we naturally seek to find some common measure of them, by which we can talk about and describe them _exactly_, and independently of the peculiarities of individual observers. Thus we seek to find some common phenomenon which underlies (as we say) the sensations of heat and cold, or of light and darkness, or something which explains (_i.e._, is always present in) the case of falling bodies--and to do this we adopt the method of generalisation above described, _i.e._, we observe a great number of individual cases and then see what qualities or attributes they have in common. So far good. But it is just here that the fallacy of the ordinary scientific procedure comes in; for, forgetting that these common qualities are mere abstractions from the real phenomena we credit _them_ with a real existence, and regard the actual phenomena as secondary results, "effects" or what-not of these "causes." This in plain language is putting the cart before the horse--or rather the shadow before the man. Thus finding that a vast number of variously shaped and coloured bodies tend to fall towards the earth, we erect this common attribute of falling into an independent existence which we call "attraction" or "gravitation"--and ultimately posit a universal gravitation _acting_ on all bodies in Nature!--or finding that a number of different substances, such as water, air, wood, etc., convey to us the sensation we call sound, and that in all these cases the common element is vibration, we detach the attribute vibration, credit it with a separate existence, and speak of it as the cause of sound. But though we may thus _think_ of the shadow as separate from the man, the shadow cannot _be_ separate from the man; and though we may try to think of the falling or the vibration as separate from the wood or the stone, such falling and vibration cannot exist apart from these and other such materials, and the effort to speak of it as so existing ends in mere nonsense. More strange still is the fatuity, when, as in the case of the undulatory Theory of light or the Atomic theory of physics, the concepts thus erected into actualities are composed of purely imaginary attributes--of which no one has had any experience--an undulatory ether in the one case, a hard and perfectly elastic atom in the other. The total result is of course--just what we see--Science landing itself in pure absurdities in every direction. Beginning by detaching the attribute of falling from the bodies that fall--beginning that is by an abstraction, which of course is also a falsity--it generalises and