A fruitful science relates itself to something more than a mere independent object. A fruitful science involves synthesis, not formal, but real synthesis, as well as analysis, its decomposed object being also only the separated details of some organizing activity. Indeed, however unconsciously, or even however against its own avowed interest and desire, science has that organizing activity in the real life. The "real life" has seemed aloof, but science is truly an integral part of this life. Science's very genesis in social evolution, in spite of, nay, even because of its abstraction by a distinct class and the assumption of a professional garb, is witness to this relationship. Again, fruitful science is practical invention, not abstract discovery, and the real life of a person or a society or a race is as important to it, as much a warrant of its conclusions, as any object, however mathematically described or describable, with which science was ever concerned. As for the thing invented, the tool or the machine, in general the instrument of adaptation to environment, this sometimes takes visible, wholly material form; sometimes it appears as a method in the practical arts or in the fine arts or in education or government; sometimes it is only an [p.078] atmosphere or point of view, a habit of mind; but whatever it is, it is useful, incalculably useful, and its invention as something that is widely distinguished from mere receptive observation, if this be even possible, or from mere accurate description, is science's primary justification. But this, objects somebody, is sentiment, and sentiment of the sort that quite destroys science, making real science, serious and accurate science, quite impossible. Well, it does of course dispense with a purely objective science. It suggests the idea, perhaps the uncomfortable idea, that, as in some other departments in life, so in science, death is a condition of success. Science must die to its objective self before it is saved; it must lose its whole world to gain its own soul. Or, to put the same idea differently, if the assertion be not too much like verbal play, a subjective science is not hopelessly unscientific. Is a man less interested in having a proper edge on his razor because eventually he must use it on himself? Nothing but a keen edge can ever ensure a "velvet shave," and nothing but the truth, the more accurate it be the better, can ever set anybody free.