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Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931

"English Prose A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice"

The
student of natural science is loyal to the cause of the enlargement of
this organized and criticized realm of the common human experience.
Unless this unity of human experience is a genuine reality, unless all
the workers are living a really common life, unless each man is,
potentially at least, in a live spiritual unity with his fellows,
science itself is a mere metaphor, its truth is an illusion, its results
are myths. For science is conceived as true only by conceiving the
experiences of countless observers as the sharing of a common realm of
experience. If, as we all believe, the natural sciences do throw a real,
if indeed an inadequate, light upon the nature of things, then they do
so because no one man's experience is disconnected from the real whole
of human experience. They do so because the cause to which the loyal
study of science is devoted, the cause of the enlargement of human
experience, is a cause that has a supernatural, or, as Professor
Muensterberg loves to say, an over-individual, type of reality.


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