2 ;o HUMANISM 



XV 



and no really vigorous movement pays much heed to 

 what philosophers are saying. 



Nevertheless philosophy seems to me to have also 

 a more important function, which may enable it to be 

 scientifically suggestive and serviceable, at all events at a 

 certain stage in the development of a science. 



The function in question is that of discussing the 

 working methods of a science, of exhibiting their full 

 scope and logical implications and connexions, and 

 considering the merits of the alternative ways of treating 

 the subject. Such a critical methodology of a science is 

 necessarily dull, but, perhaps, on that account, all the 

 better adapted for philosophic discourse. And in view 

 of the intellectual myopia which scientific specialism 

 engenders, there are, perhaps, few things more salutary, 

 as an unpleasant medicine is salutary, than for a science 

 to become conscious of the working assumptions, or, if I 

 may be permitted so to call them, the methodological 

 postulates, on which it proceeds. 



In the case of Psychical Research, in particular, the 

 discussion of such methodological assumptions seems to 

 be more novel, easier and more useful than in disciplines 

 which have already reached a more assured position among 

 the sciences. It is likely to be more novel, because of the 

 novelty of the whole subject. It is likely to be easier to 

 dissect out and contemplate in abstraction the methodo 

 logical assumptions of an inchoate and infant science, 

 because its organism is not so strongly knit and the flesh 

 of fact does not so closely shroud the bone of method 

 by which it is supported ; it is still in a low stage of 

 organisation in which the whole may be taken to pieces 

 and put together without much injury to the vitality of 

 its parts. An advanced science, on the other hand, is far 

 more difficult to handle : it imposes on the philosophic 

 critic by its very mass of coherent and consistent in 

 terpretation ; it appeals to him by its noble record of 

 service to the human race ; it crushes him by the sheer 

 weight of immemorial authority. In it facts and theories 

 have long been welded together into so indissoluble a 



