we must understand a great part of the phenomena going on at its surface before we can know its position, etc., in the solar system.  It is not simply that, as we have already shown, those geometrical and mechanical principles by which celestial appearances are explained, were first generalised from terrestrial experiences; but it is that the very obtainment of correct data, on which to base astronomical generalisations, implies advanced terrestrial physics.

Until after optics had made considerable advance, the Copernican system remained but a speculation.  A single modern observation on a star has to undergo a careful analysis by the combined aid of various sciences—­has to be digested by the organism of the sciences; which have severally to assimilate their respective parts of the observation, before the essential fact it contains is available for the further development of astronomy.  It has to be corrected not only for nutation of the earth’s axis and for precession of the equinoxes, but for aberration and for refraction; and the formation of the tables by which refraction is calculated, presupposes knowledge of the law of decreasing density in the upper atmospheric strata; of the law of decreasing temperature, and the influence of this on the density; and of hygrometric laws as also affecting density.  So that, to get materials for further advance, astronomy requires not only the indirect aid of the sciences which have presided over the making of its improved instruments, but the direct aid of an advanced optics, of barology, of thermology, of hygrometry; and if we remember that these delicate observations are in some cases registered electrically, and that they are further corrected for the “personal equation”—­the time elapsing between seeing and registering, which varies with different observers—­we may even add electricity and psychology.  If, then, so apparently simple a thing as ascertaining the position of a star is complicated with so many phenomena, it is clear that this notion of the independence of the sciences, or certain of them, will not hold.

Whether objectively independent or not, they cannot be subjectively so—­they cannot have independence as presented to our consciousness; and this is the only kind of independence with which we are concerned.  And here, before leaving these illustrations, and especially this last one, let us not omit to notice how clearly they exhibit that increasingly active consensus of the sciences which characterises their advancing development.  Besides finding that in these later times a discovery in one science commonly causes progress in others; besides finding that a great part of the questions with which modern science deals are so mixed as to require the co-operation of many sciences for their solution; we find in this last case that, to make a single good observation in the purest of the natural sciences, requires the combined assistance of half a dozen other sciences.