century, common-sense struggled hard to ignore individuality in shells
and plants and animals. There was an attempt to eliminate the more
conspicuous departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's weak
moments; and it was only with the establishment of Darwin's great
generalizations that the hard and fast classificatory system broke down
and individuality came to its own. Yet there had always been a clearly
felt difference between the conclusions of the biological sciences and
those dealing with lifeless substance, in the relative vagueness, the
insubordinate looseness and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist
accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantly
from generalization to generalization after the fashion of the chemist
or physicist. It is easy to see, therefore, how it came about that the
inorganic sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was
scarcely suspected that the biological sciences might perhaps after all
be TRUER than the experimental, in spite of the difference in practical
value in favour of the latter. It was, and is by the great majority of
people to this day, supposed to be the latter that are invincibly true;
and the former are regarded as a more complex set of problems merely,
with obliquities and refractions that presently will be explained away.
Comte and Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that much
for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and
unknowable, but not in this sense as an element of inexactness running
through all things. He thought, it seems to me, of the unknown as the
indefinable Beyond of an immediate world that might be quite clearly and
definitely known.

There is a growing body of people which is beginning to hold the
converse view--that counting, classification, measurement, the whole
fabric of mathematics, is subjective and untrue to the world of fact,
and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the