Let us leave that deadlock—(I will try to solve it in another lecture)—and let us take the deadlock in science. Now that is very curious at the present time. Science is essentially in the West, as it is everywhere, a matter of observation, of measurement, of estimating quantities and understanding relations. But our science is coming to the end of its powers along these lines in a very curious and marked way. It cannot get its apparatus more delicate than it has got it; its balances are marvels, measuring inappreciable parts of an almost inappreciable grain. Nothing more exquisite than the delicacy of scientific apparatus, nothing more a testimony to the accuracy of the scientific mind. And yet how the apparatus is failing the scientist! how his observations are becoming increasingly difficult! What can he do with the atom? The chemist, the physicist, can he follow the atom and make that still a matter of observation, or does it wholly escape him? is the chemist, the physicist, now obliged to turn to the mathematician to make for him an atom which will answer the demands of the science which is unable to discover it for itself? All the later arguments on the atom, if you notice, are based on mathematical formulæ; they cannot observe; it is too fine, delicate, minute—it escapes them. Even the chemical atom, which is four degrees below the ultimate physical atom, is a matter on which they are compelled to reason because they cannot observe. But a science which reasons without those reasons being based on observations is no science as the West has known it up to the present time. All scientific reasoning is supposed to be based on observation; and if, instead of that, scientists have to fall back on reason where observation fails them, then a new method must be discovered, and new ways must be trodden. I do not say there is no new method; I do not say there are not new ways; but they are not the methods and the ways of the science of our own time. And there comes in this difficulty: the minute is escaping science by its minuteness, the subtle is too subtle for its investigation. If that be true—and it is true of chemistry and physics, and true also to a very great extent of electricity—we find that all the sciences are coming up to the borderland in which their methods fail them, and their senses no longer answer to the delicacy of the waves that beat upon them from the outer world. They are leaving behind them the gross and the dense; that is conquered, it is theirs; the subtle and the rare, those escape them; and the instruments of brass, of glass, nay, even of sensitive needles, they are not fine enough nor subtle enough to carry investigation further.