proclaims as a law to-day what the next generation will recognize to be an error and which it will replace by a new law of equally short currency. But that is unjust and in part untrue. The transformation of scientific ideas is a process of development and progress, not of revolution. A law that was at first held to be universally valid proves to be a special case of a more comprehensive law, or else its scope is limited by another law not discovered until later; a rough approximation to the truth is replaced by one more carefully adjusted, which in its turn awaits a further approach to perfection. In several spheres we have not yet surmounted a phase of investigation in which we test hypotheses that have soon to be rejected as inadequate; but in others we have already an assured and almost immutable core of knowledge. Finally an attempt has been made to discredit radically scientific endeavour on the ground that, bound as it is to the conditions of our own organization, it can yield nothing but subjective results, while the real nature of things outside us remains inaccessible to it. But this is to disregard several factors of decisive importance for the understanding of scientific work. Firstly, our organization, _i.e._ our mental apparatus, has been developed actually in the attempt to explore the outer world, and therefore it must have realized in its structure a certain measure of appropriateness; secondly, it itself is a constituent part of that world which we are to investigate, and readily admits of such investigation; thirdly, the task of science is fully circumscribed if we confine it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of the particular character of our organization; fourthly, the ultimate findings of science, just because of the way in which they are attained, are conditioned not only by our organization but also by that which has affected this organization; and, finally, the problem of the nature of the world irrespective of our perceptive mental apparatus is an empty abstraction without practical interest. No, science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES ● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Used numbers for footnotes. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.