238 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



system has become a matter of merely historical curiosity. 1 

 Love of system, therefore, and the system-maker's vanity 

 which becomes associated with it, are among the snares 

 that the student of philosophy must guard against. 



The desire to establish this or that result, or generally 

 to discover evidence for agreeable results, of whatever 

 kind, has of course been the chief obstacle to honest 

 philosophising. So strangely perverted do men become 

 by unrecognised passions, that a determination in advance 

 to arrive at this or that conclusion is generally regarded 

 as a mark of virtue, and those whose studies lead to 

 an opposite conclusion are thought to be wicked. No 

 doubt it is commoner to wish to arrive at an agreeable 

 result than to wish to arrive at a true result. But only 

 those in whom the desire to arrive at a true result is 

 paramount can hope to serve any good purpose by the 

 study of philosophy. 



But even when the desire to know exists in the 

 requisite strength, the mental vision by which abstract 

 truth is recognised is hard to distinguish from vivid 

 imaginability and consonance with mental habits. It is 

 necessary to practise methodological doubt, like Descartes, 

 in order to loosen the hold of mental habits ; and it is 

 necessary to cultivate logical imagination, in order to 

 have a number of hypotheses at command, and not to be 

 the slave of the one which common sense has rendered 

 easy to imagine. These two processes, of doubting the 

 familiar and imagining the unfamiliar, are correlative, 

 and form the chief part of the mental training required 

 for a philosopher. 



The na'ive beliefs which we find in ourselves when we 

 first begin the process of philosophic reflection may turn 



1 The above remarks, for purposes of illustration, adopt one of several 

 possible opinions on each of several disputed points. 



