primary sense of humanity. Indeed the truest truth is that which is the expression of the deepest feeling, and if there is an absolute truth it can only be known and expressed by him who has the absolute feeling or Being within himself. This being so--and the nature of the intellectual processes being, like the links in a chain, transitional--it becomes obvious that the intellectual results may figure as a _means_ but never as an end in themselves. To hang any weight of reliance on them in the latter sense is like the Chinese Trick--described by Marco Polo--of throwing a rope's end up in the air and then climbing up the rope. Hence it appears that our scientific theories are perfectly legitimate, as long as they are formed as a means towards _practical_ applications. In that sense they are transitional; they are formed, not as substantial truths, but merely as links in a chain towards some definite practical result. For this purpose we may form whatever theories are convenient: if we are calculating the strength of bridges, we may adopt what generalisations we like concerning mechanical structure, as long as they give us actual and practical results; if we are predicting eclipses, we may make use of any theory that will do. The theory does not matter, as long as it hauls the practical result after it, just as it does not matter whether your cable is of iron or hemp or silk, as long as you can get your ship into dock with it. In this sense our Modern Science is, I conceive, admirable. For practical results and brief predictions it affords a quantity of useful generalisations--shorthand notes and conventional symbols and pocket summaries of phenomena--which bear about the same relation to the actual world that a map does to the country it is supposed to represent. It cannot be said to have any resemblance to the real thing--but, when you understand the principle on which it is formed, it is exceedingly useful for finding your way about. As long as Science therefore keeps the practical end in view, and starting from sense seeks to return to sense again, its intermediate theorising is perfectly legitimate; but the moment it credits its theory with a positive and authoritative existence, as an actual representation of facts--and endeavours to pass by means of it into unverifiable and abstract regions, as of invisible germs or atoms, or far distances of space, or the remote past or future--it is simply throwing its rope's end into the sky and trying to climb up! That "the wish is father to the thought" is in its wide sense profoundly true. In the individual, feeling precedes thinking--as the body precedes the clothes. In history, the Rousseau precedes the Voltaire. There is, I believe, a physiological parallel; for behind the brain and determining its action stands the great sympathetic nerve--the organ of the emotions. In fact here the brain appears as distinctly transitional. It stands between the nerves