But, stronger even than realism, was a third adversity—the pride of the human mind. Socrates, although, for ethics and politics, he initiated the inductive method, was disposed to regard physical speculations as but a rational pastime[37], and the political and ethical study of man as the only serious engagement of thought. Aristotle took up natural knowledge as an encyclopedist[38]; he rarely verified his facts and he made no experimental researches[39]. The medieval church held that “ex puris naturalibus cognoscere” was a meagre and might be a mischievous amusement; and it sought to confine speculations to final causes, that is to the animation of the world by an intelligent Being, as man animates his own instruments: though, as Roger Bacon declared, final causes must have physical means. Even Locke thought nature to be hopelessly complex, and urged that ethics is the proper study of man. The asceticism derived from the East, disdainful of carnal things, brought the dualism of matter and spirit into monstrous eminence; and, in respect of medicine, in a few generations it turned the cleanest people in the world into the most filthy[40]. Moreover, are we not bound to admit that, as ultimate analysis was dangerous to the synthesis of the Faith, so for unwieldy and unstable societies in which ethical and political habits had not yet become engrained, to descend from transcendental explanations to explanations by lower categories was fraught with some danger to lofty and imposing standards of custom and conduct? Nature is too base, says St Anselm, for us to argue from it to God; we must argue from God to things. Analysis is a disintegrating function; the departure of the scientific enquirer is rather from below upwards: it is not only his bias but also his deliberate method to decline to use the discipline and the conceptions of higher categories until he is satisfied that those of the lower are inadequate. A certain natural process may not be attributed to those of chemistry until those of physics are proved to be inadequate; to another process biological conceptions and methods are denied until those of physics first, and then of chemistry, have been tried and found wanting; psychological conceptions are denied to another until in their turns the physical, the chemical, and the physiological are exhausted[41]; and so on: and within each category the same economy prevails. Now this scientific economy, perhaps first formulated, or effectively used, by William Ockham, in the phrase “entia non sunt multiplicanda”—known as “Ockham’s rasor”—is what is called now-a-days “materialism”; and there is no doubt that the method, legitimate, nay, imperative, as it is in natural science, may in custom and conduct engender a personal and collective habit of apprehending in lower categories, and even of contentment in them until strong reason be shown to go higher[42]. A higher order of ideas is put