former are regarded as a more complex set of problems merely, with obliquities and refractions that presently will be explained away.  Comte and Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that much for granted.  Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and the unknowable, but not in this sense, as an element of inexactness running through all things.  He thought of the unknown as the indefinable beyond to an immediate world that might be quite clearly and exactly known.

Well, there is a growing body of people who are beginning to hold the converse view—­that counting, classification, measurement, the whole fabric of mathematics, is subjective and deceitful, and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth.  As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalisation increases, because individuality tells more and more.  Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalise about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins.  That concisely is the minority belief, and it is the belief on which this present paper is based.

Now, what is called the scientific method is the method of ignoring individualities; and, like many mathematical conventions, its great practical convenience is no proof whatever of its final truth.  Let me admit the enormous value, the wonder of its results in mechanics, in all the physical sciences, in chemistry, even in physiology—­but what is its value beyond that?  Is the scientific method of value in biology?  The great advances made by Darwin and his school in biology were not made, it must be remembered, by the scientific method, as it is generally conceived, at all.  He conducted a research into pre-documentary history.  He collected information along the lines indicated by certain interrogations; and the bulk of his work was the digesting and critical analysis of that.  For documents and monuments he had fossils and anatomical structures and germinating eggs too innocent to lie, and so far he was nearer simplicity.  But, on the other hand, he had to correspond with breeders and travellers of various sorts, classes entirely analogous, from the point of view of evidence, to the writers of history and memoirs.  I question profoundly whether the word “science,” in current usage anyhow, ever means such patient disentanglement as Darwin pursued.  It means the attainment of something positive and emphatic in the way of a conclusion, based on amply repeated experiments capable of infinite repetition, “proved,” as they say, “up to the hilt.”