Illusive, and exists only through misunderstanding. For

the object of natural science is not at all the

ascertainment of ultimate truth, and its province does

not fall outside phenomena. The ideas, with which it

works, are not intended to set out the true character of

reality. And, therefore, to subject these ideas to

metaphysical criticism, or, from the other side, to

oppose them to metaphysics, is to mistake their end and

bearing. The question is not whether the principles of

physical science possess an absolute truth to which they

make no claim. The question is whether the abstraction,

employed by that science, is legitimate and useful. And

with regard to that question there surely can be no

doubt. In order to understand the co-existence and

sequence of phenomena, natural science makes an

intellectual construction of their conditions.

Its matter, motion, and force are but working ideas,

used to understand the occurrence of certain events. To

find and systematize the ways in which spatial phenomena

are connected and happen--this is all the mark which

these conceptions aim at. And for the metaphysician to

urge that these ideas contradict themselves, is

irrelevant and unfair. To object that in the end they

are not true, is to mistake their pretensions.

And thus when matter is treated of as a thing

standing in its own right, continuous and identical,

metaphysics is not concerned. For, in order to study the

laws of a class of phenomena, these phenomena are simply

regarded by themselves. The implication of Nature, as a

subordinate element, within souls has not been denied,

but in practice, and for practice, ignored. And, when we

hear of a time before organisms existed, that, in the

first place, should mean organisms of the kind that we

know; and it should be said merely with regard to one

part of the Universe. Or, at all events, it is not a

statement of the actual history of the ultimate Reality,

but is a convenient method of considering certain facts

apart from others. And thus, while metaphysics and

natural science keep each to its own business, a

collision is impossible. Neither needs defence against

the other, except through misunderstanding.

But that misunderstandings on both sides have been

too often provoked I think no one can deny. Too often

the science of mere Nature, forgetting its own limits

and false to its true aims, attempts to speak about

first principles. It becomes transcendent, and offers us

a dogmatic and uncritical metaphysics. Thus to assert

that, in the history of the Universe at large, matter

came before mind, is to place development and succession

within the Absolute (Chapter xxvi.), and is to make real

outside the Whole a mere element in its being.

And such a doctrine not only is not natural science,

but, even if we suppose it otherwise to have any value,

for that science, at least, it is worthless. For assume

that force matter and motion are more than mere working