ON THE NOTION OF CAUSE 241 



might seem frivolous, for it is often only through the 

 consideration of such matters that the greater problems 

 can be approached. 



When our problem has been selected, and the necessary 

 mental discipline has been acquired, the method to be 

 pursued is fairly uniform. The big problems which 

 provoke philosophical inquiry are found, on examination, 

 to be complex, and to depend upon a number of com- 

 ponent problems, usually more abstract than those of 

 which they are the components. It will generally be 

 found that all our initial data, all the facts that we seem 

 to know to begin with, suffer from vagueness, confusion, 

 and complexity. Current philosophical ideas share these 

 defects ; it is therefore necessary to create an apparatus 

 of precise conceptions as general and as free from com- 

 plexity as possible, before the data can be analysed into 

 the kind of premisses which philosophy aims at discover- 

 ing. In this process of analysis, the source of difficulty is 

 tracked further and further back, growing at each stage 

 more abstract, more refined, more difficult to apprehend. 

 Usually it will be found that a number of these extra- 

 ordinarily abstract questions underlie any one of the big 

 obvious problems. When everything has been done that 

 can be done by method, a stage is reached where only 

 direct philosophic vision can carry matters further. Here 

 only genius will avail. What is wanted, as a rule, is 

 some new effort of logical imagination, some glimpse of 

 a possibility never conceived before, and then the direct 

 perception that this possibility is realised in the case in 

 question. Failure to think of the right possibility leaves 

 insoluble difficulties, balanced arguments pro and con, 

 utter bewilderment and despair. But the right possibility, 

 as a rule, when once conceived, justifies itself swiftly by 



its astonishing power of absorbing apparently conflicting 



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