The Dogmatism of Science Page 1

Henry Thomas Buckle, in a paper read at the weekly evening meeting of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Friday, March 19th, 1858, said that "an exclusive employment of the inductive philosophy was contracting the minds of physical inquirers and gradually shutting out speculations respecting causes and entities; limiting the student to questions of distribution, and forbidding to him questions of origin; making everything hang on two sets of laws, namely, those of co-existence and of sequence; and declaring beforehand how far future knowledge can carry us. But," added this great man, "we shall not always be satisfied with seeing the laws of nature rest on this empirical basis; and the most advanced thinkers are looking to a period when we shall deal with problems of a much higher kind than any yet solved; when we shall incorporate mind and matter into a single study; when we shall seek to raise the veil and penetrate into the secret of things."

No man nor woman of intelligence, who is conversant with the writings of "the most advanced thinkers" of our age, can fail to see that this time is near at hand; and yet dogmatic science refuses to put itself in a position where it could announce that the veil is already raised, and, to quote the words of Prof. Lascelles-Scott¹, that "the door which

¹ Physicist at the Government Physical and Chemical Laboratories, Forest Gate, Essex.