reputable writers off their guard against such bad analogy. But indeed
it is impossible to isolate complete communities of men, or to trace any
but rude general resemblances between group and group. These alleged
units have as much individuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go,
they fuse and separate. And we are forced to conclude that not only is
the method of observation, experiment, and verification left far away
down the scale, but that the method of classification under types, which
has served so useful a purpose in the middle group of subjects, the
subjects involving numerous but a finite number of units, has also to be
abandoned in social science. We cannot put Humanity into a museum or dry
it for examination; our one single still living specimen is all history,
all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no
satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing else in the real world
with which to compare it. We have only the remotest ideas of its
"life-cycle" and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny.

This denial of scientific precision is true of all questions of general
human relations and attitude. And in regard to all these matters
affecting our personal motives, our self-control and our devotions, it
is much truer.

From this it is an easy step to the statement that so far as the
clear-cut confident sort of knowledge goes, the sort of knowledge one
gets from a time-table or a text-book of chemistry, or seeks from a
witness in a police court, I am, in relation to religious and moral
questions an agnostic. I do not think any general propositions partaking
largely of the nature of fact can be known about these things. There is
nothing possessing the general validity of fact to be stated or known.