to their credit the coming off of their hazarded predictions, which they can show no title to regard as due to anything else than the same luck. The track of the history of the sciences is strewn with the wreckage of outworn systematizations, falsified predictions, and discarded anticipationes naturae. It is idle to urge that they have been discarded, and by the sciences themselves. The sciences must be judged by their whole past performance and their present profession. What they profess is to know in advance, to inform with respect to the future. In this they profess to exclude luck, and yet they must avow themselves engaged in a gamble with unknown antagonists who are not bound to any as yet securely discovered rules of the game. The course of Nature is a series of surprises: its pretended uniformity is a libel.
Whatever comfort the lover of unity may derive from considering the practical successes of common sense or the sciences, such considerations are not sufficient to justify the high philosophic demand for assured unity and system in and throughout all differences. And yet we need not despair: we must beware of first impressions. For the philosopher—the lover of, and believer in, unity—is not surprised by differences; he expects them: he is quite ready to acknowledge them, and has no desire to ignore or belittle them. What he believes in is not mere or blank unity, or unity alongside of differences, or even unity permitting them, but systematic or organic unity which requires differences within its ordered and harmonious structure. Such is the unity he expects, and indeed knows, Reality to be. It is therefore no shock to him to find it fertile in the manifestation of differences, or even to find the appearance of multiplicity at first masking its inner unity and orderliness. Only he will
