Still we have, thirdly, the agnosticism of science to consider and appraise. Agnosticism confines knowledge to actual positive experience, and in its form of "positivism" to an only tentative acceptance of actual experience, and it is thus in effect an admission of [p.107] just those limitations which have been found to belong to science as objective and special. Objectivism and specialism have both shown science to be standing in its own light, or at least to be standing in the way of any direct and positive knowledge of reality. Whatever they make possible to our virtual as distinct from our positive consciousness, whatever indirectly or implicitly may through them belong to our conscious life, formally and visibly, positively and directly, we cannot know reality. In a word, science must and does recognize an unknowable, or at least an unknowability in things, and agnosticism is accordingly important among the three determining points of science's circumference. But here is now our problem: Does science put the right value upon, does it ascribe the right meaning to, its agnosticism? Is the implied scepticism of the sort that we can cordially accept? Especially, does science have any due appreciation of the negative, not to say of the suggested dualism, in the opposition between the knowable and the unknowable? Now both objectivism and specialism plainly involve aloofness, which is perhaps only another word for what in the preceding chapter was called abstraction. By the first of these two "isms" science is held aloof from life; by the second, through the many divisions, from itself, that is to say, part from part. Men who would be scientists withdraw, as we hear them boast, from affairs, and as they withdraw it is also as if they put on distorting and even discolouring glasses, through which in one and another "special" way they would behold the "objective" world. Their withdrawal [p.108] is thus not merely physical; it is also mental. To look out of the window one must turn one's head and lift one's eyes and adjust both head and eyes in other ways; but looking in general, whether from the needs of an objective or a special view, also demands certain pertinent adjustments, and the demanded adjustments make the resulting experience just so far aloof, just so far discoloured and distorted. Granted that these terms can be only relative in significance. To be aloof from something is to have it equally aloof from you, and you should be no more discredited by the separation than it. To be distorted and discoloured is to be so only with regard to something that in its own peculiar way may be equally transformed. Such relativity, however, cannot deprive the differences involved of real significance; it can only emphasize the general instead of the narrow, local application of the terms found to be relative. What is relative is not unreal; it is simply shared, like cousinship. So science, the looking of science,