28 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



seldom sought and hardly ever achieved. Men have 

 remembered their wishes, and have judged philosophies 

 in relation to their wishes. Driven from the particular 

 sciences, the belief that the notions of good and evil must 

 afford a key to the understanding of the world has sought 

 a refuge in philosophy. But even from this last refuge, 

 if philosophy is not to remain a set of pleasing dreams, 

 this belief must be driven forth. It is a commonplace 

 that happiness is not best achieved by those who seek 

 it directly ; and it would seem that the same is true of 

 the good. In thought, at any rate, those who forget 

 good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more 

 likely to achieve good than those who view the world 

 through the distorting medium of their own desires. 



The immense extension of our knowledge of facts in 

 recent times has had, as it had in the Renaissance, two 

 effects upon the general intellectual outlook. On the one 

 hand, it has made men distrustful of the truth of wide, 

 ambitious systems : theories come and go swiftly, each 

 serving, for a moment, to classify known facts and pro- 

 mote the search for new ones, but each in turn proving 

 inadequate to deal with the new facts when they have 

 been found. Even those who invent the theories do not, 

 in science, regard them as anything but a temporary 

 makeshift. The ideal of an all-embracing synthesis, such 

 as the Middle Ages believed themselves to have attained, 

 recedes further and further beyond the limits of what 

 seems 'feasible. In such a world, as in the world of 

 Montaigne, nothing seems worth while except the dis- 

 covery of more and more facts, each in turn the death- 

 blow to some cherished theory ; the ordering intellect 

 grows weary, and becomes slovenly through despair. 



On the other hand, the new facts have brought new 

 powers ; man's physical control over natural forces has 



