And another fact, besides that of the actual applications of science, which, however violent, prove the need as well as the dangers, and besides the sophistication, perhaps also the sense of humour, which always accompanies the applications and at least tempers their violence, must also be mentioned. Those science-formed programmes always go in pairs. Individualism and socialism, realism and mysticism, Epicureanism and Stoicism, orthodoxy and heresy are inseparable, socially and historically; and the effect of such pairing is plainly to correct whatever of violence the sense of symbolism and the sophistication and the humour of the time may be unequal to. Thus in the movements and programmes of society for any given misfit there is always a counter-misfit. Possibly human life, at least as socially organized, is only a competition of misfits, its programmes coming, not through the acquired supremacy of one side or the other, but through the constant mediation, the balancing and interacting of the two, and the misfits are perhaps exclusively the gifts of science or at least [p.117] of the observer's consciousness generally, and man is at once serious and humorous enough to impose what science gives on the real life of his fellows, as a ready-made clothier might on a stray countryman; but is a city, then, to have no Hyam, and is the life of society also to dispense with the gifts of science because they are imperfect? There are worse things than clothes not made to measure or than the men who sell or buy them. There is the life that never changes its old clothes for new. There are the clothes that never get on the market at all.
Accordingly the interference of the scientific with the volitional point of view is, to say the least, not the only danger which the scientist or the practical man needs to recognize. There is also the danger that the disparity between science and life, or between knowledge and the unknowable, will be construed to mean that the two are never to live together. Science may be innocent of any direct accord with reality, being in form quite innocent of a real realism, but after all, whether by itself or in its various applications or renderings in human life, it is so innocent only in a qualified sense, only with reference to the form of its specific doctrine and attitudes taken individually. As itself a living whole, part acting upon part, each abstraction corrected by some counter-abstraction or perhaps by some inner self-opposition, as conscious too of its own conditions and limitations, as sophisticated and even humorous, both for all logical purposes and for all purposes of applicability in the life of society it is realism itself. As harbouring what above was called, in so many words, an [p.118] inner active spirit of veracity or power for reality, a constant agent of validity and applicability, it is itself a party to the real life.