There is a growing body of people which is beginning to hold the converse view—­that counting, classification, measurement, the whole fabric of mathematics, is subjective and untrue to the world of fact, and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth.  As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalization increases, because individuality tells for more and more.  Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins.  That concisely is the minority belief, and my belief.

Now what is called the scientific method in the physical sciences rests upon the ignoring of 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.  His was historical research.  He conducted 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.  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.”

It would be of course possible to dispute whether the word “science” should convey this quality of certitude, but to most people it certainly does at the present time.  So far as the movements of comets and electric trams go, there is no doubt practically cock-sure science; and Comte and Herbert Spencer seem to me to have believed that cock-sure could be extended to every conceivable finite thing.  The fact that Herbert Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the non-individualizing quality of his primary assumptions and of his mental texture.  He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an evolutionary product from an original homogeneity, begotten by folding and multiplying and dividing and twisting it, and still fundamentally it.  It seems to me that the general usage is entirely for the limitation of the word “science” to knowledge and the search after knowledge of a high degree of precision.  And not simply the general usage; “Science is measurement,” Science is “organized commonsense,” proud in fact of its essential error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms.