out of the realm of nature, and offered to explain both it and man in physical and mathematical terms.  But, in our day, the man of science has become too cautious to make such rash extensions of the principles he uses.  He is more inclined to limit himself to his special field, and he refuses to make any declaration as to the ultimate nature of things.  He holds himself apart from materialism, as he does from idealism.  I think I may even go further, and say that the fatal flaw of materialism has been finally detected, and that the essential relativity of all objects to thought is all but universally acknowledged.

The common notion that science gives a complete view of truth, to which we may appeal as refuting idealism, is untenable.  Science itself will not support the appeal, but will direct the appellant to another court.  Perhaps, rather, it would be truer to say that its attitude is one of doubt whether or not any court, philosophical or other, can give any valid decision on the matter.  Confining themselves to the region of material phenomena, scientific men generally leave to common ignorance, or to moral and theological tradition, all the interests and activities of man, other than those which are physical or physiological.  And some of them are even aware, that if they could find the physical equation of man, or, through their knowledge of physiology, actually produce in man the sensations, thoughts, and notions now ascribed to the intelligent life within him, the question of the spiritual or material nature of man and the world, would remain precisely where it was.  The explanation would still begin with mind and end there.  The principles of the materialistic explanation of the world would still be derived from intelligence; mind would still underlie all it explained, and completed science would still be, in this sense, anthropomorphic.  The charge of anthropomorphism thus falls to the ground, because it would prove too much.  It is a weapon which cuts the hand that wields it.  And, as directed against idealism, it only shows that he who uses it has inadequate notions both of the nature of the self and of the world, and is not aware that each gets meaning, only as an exponent of the other.

On the whole, we may say that it is not men of science who now assail philosophy, because it gives an idealistic explanation of the world, so much as unsystematic dabblers in matters of thought.  The best men of science, rather, show a tendency to acquiesce in a kind of dualism of matter and spirit, and to leave morality and religion, art and philosophy to pursue their own ends undisturbed.  Mr. Huxley, for instance, and some others, offer two philosophical solutions, one proceeding from the material world and the other from the sensations and other “facts of consciousness.”  They say that we may either explain man as a natural phenomenon, or the world as a mental one.