236 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



memory creates the past. We do not think we were 

 necessarily not free in the past, merely because we can 

 now remember our past volitions. Similarly, we might 

 be free in the future, even if we could now see what our 

 future volitions were going to be. Freedom, in short, in 

 any valuable sense, demands only that our volitions shall 

 be, as they are, the result of our own desires, not of an 

 outside force compelling us to will what we would 

 rather not will. Everything else is confusion of thought, 

 due to the feeling that knowledge compels the happening 

 of what it knows when this is future, though it is at once 

 obvious that knowledge has no such power in regard to 

 the past. Free will, therefore, is true in the only form 

 which is important ; and the desire for other forms is a 

 mere effect of insufficient analysis. 



What has been said on philosophical method in the 

 foregoing lectures has been rather by means of illustrations 

 in particular cases than by means of general precepts. 

 Nothing of any value can be said on method except 

 through examples ; but now, at the end of our course, 

 we may collect certain general maxims which may pos- 

 sibly be a help in acquiring a philosophical habit of 

 mind and a guide in looking for solutions of philosophic 

 problems. 



Philosophy does not become scientific by making use 

 of other sciences, in the kind of way in which (e.g.) 

 Herbert Spencer does. Philosophy aims at what is 

 general, and the special sciences, however they may suggest 

 large generalisations, cannot make them certain. And 

 a hasty generalisation, such as Spencer's generalisation 

 of evolution, is none the less hasty because what is 

 generalised is the latest scientific theory. Philosophy is 

 a study apart from the other sciences : its results cannot 



