Now my contention is that we can arrange the fields of human thought and interest about the world of fact in a sort of scale.  At one end the number of units is infinite and the methods exact, at the other we have the human subjects in which there is no exactitude.  The science of society stands at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences.  In these latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there is only one unit.  It is true that Herbert Spencer, in order to get classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim has pointed out, separate human society into societies, and made believe they competed one with another and died and reproduced just like animals, and that economists following List have for the purposes of fiscal controversy discovered economic types; but this is a transparent device, and one is surprised to find thoughtful and reputable writers off their guard against such bad analogy.  But indeed it is impossible to isolate complete communities of men, or to trace any but rude general resemblances between group and group.  These alleged units have as much individuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse and separate.  And we are forced to conclude that not only is the method of observation, experiment, and verification left far away down the scale, but that the method of classification under types, which has served so useful a purpose in the middle group of subjects, the subjects involving numerous but a finite number of units, has also to be abandoned in social science.  We cannot put Humanity into a museum or dry it for examination; our one single still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men.  There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing else in the real world with which to compare it.  We have only the remotest ideas of its “life-cycle” and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny.

This denial of scientific precision is true of all questions of general human relations and attitude.  And in regard to all these matters affecting our personal motives, our self-control and our devotions, it is much truer.

From this it is an easy step to the statement that so far as the clear-cut confident sort of knowledge goes, the sort of knowledge one gets from a time-table or a text-book of chemistry, or seeks from a witness in a police court, I am, in relation to religious and moral questions an agnostic.  I do not think any general propositions partaking largely of the nature of fact can be known about these things.  There is nothing possessing the general validity of fact to be stated or known.

1.11.  Beliefs.

Yet it is of urgent practical necessity that we should have such propositions and beliefs.  All those we conjure out of our mental apparatus and the world of fact dissolve and disappear again under scrutiny.  It is clear we must resort to some other method for these necessities.