Thus science seeks a complete abstraction of the looking consciousness, and then with a timely duplicity it looks to a wholly external, natural world. So in the field of its peculiar abstraction does science take the character and colour of its surroundings. But, further, it presumes upon the peculiar forms and conditions of its subjective, looking consciousness, the activities of the mind, being mediative or instrumental to the presentation of the external objective world, and it uses also the activities of life at large, both the bread-and-butter activities and the mechanical inventions, both the political and the industrial organizations, as supplementary aids to its observations; for just science, the looking consciousness, is the end, and this end is presumed to justify every available means. So, again, does science take the cue from its environment, expressing in its own way and to its own purposes the general experimentalism; and this the more significantly when we remember that, besides being experimental, treating the mind as an instrument and life's activities at large as only aids more or less directly pertinent to the mind's work, it is agnostic. Its peculiar agnosticism not only reflects [p.072] its duplicity, as was before suggested, but in addition shows how very abstract its knowledge is, and--I know no better phrase--how timelily adventurous. A time of science is a time when all things final are beyond; yet also, when all things present, however mysteriously, are really leading yonder.
Further, science always divides the field of its operations, and so, besides greatly compounding its abstractness, reflects in its own way, or, as it were, projects on its own plane, what I will call the specialism of the contemporary social organization. There is division of labour in this, but there is also a difficulty, which, among other difficulties, is hereafter to be considered.
And there is, finally, one more characterization of science which is suggested by the conditions of its rise, but by something in those conditions not yet brought into clear view. An age of science is an age of a rising, although perhaps formally suppressed and disguised individualism, and quite in sympathy, the method of science is "inductive," science, though interested in classification, always having regard for the natural rights of particular things, of single individuals, reasoning from the particular to the general, as the phrase runs, not in the reverse order. Individualism has been a much misunderstood thing, be it a social movement or a logical condition of inductive thinking. The individual as person or as objective datum has been greatly abused. But at least for the present, waiving any discussion of the true character of the individual or any protest that the individual and the definite or particular must not be confused, I would only assert, but I venture to assert [p.073] strongly, first, that behind the conventionalism and utilitarianism of the life of a society divided into distinct classes, behind the abstraction and the inevitable duplicity, behind the sense of experiment and adventure, the individual person is the real power, and secondly, that in induction science has only translated this real individualism of its time into an attitude or method for the conduct of its looking consciousness. In this way, as in those other ways, has science been educated to its peculiar manner.