GENERAL OUTLINE OF METHOD 5 



importance that has been attached to general truths of the physical 

 order in contrast with these other general truths that have to 

 do with man s religion, natural or supernatural, with his moral 

 conduct in life, with the inner nature of his own mind and soul, 

 with the ultimate purpose of his existence, and with his final 

 destiny. 1 Hence, too, the very large and prominent place devoted 

 in modern treatises on logic to an analysis of the method and 

 processes by which general truths about the physical universe can 

 be securely and certainly established : as if these were the only 

 general truths of importance, or, anyhow, of most importance, to 

 man ; as if physical induction were the only or the chief method 

 of reaching a certain knowledge of the weightiest truths to which 

 the human mind can hope to attain. 



The modern logician of induction invites us into chemical, physical and 

 physiological laboratories ; he familiarizes us with test-tubes and balances, 

 with boilers and engines and dynamos, with microscopes and telescopes ; he 

 teaches us how to observe and experiment, how to detect analogies between 

 physical phenomena, how to construct hypotheses foreshadowing the laws 

 according to which these phenomena take place ; he lays down canons which 

 will help us to simplify our data by elimination of the unessential, and so to 

 test or establish or, it may be, to reject or to modify our hypotheses, until 

 we thus finally discover and generalize some abstract law about the conditions 

 requisite for the occurrence and the recurrence of some physical event. 



But the general truths we reach about the external universe, as distinct 

 from man himself, by the application of such methods, constitute only one 

 department of human knowledge an important one, no doubt, yet by no 

 means the most important. There is, for instance, the wide and fertile, if 

 more difficult, department of human research which has for its object the 

 phenomena of human activity in the individual, in the family, and in the State : 

 the domains of anthropology and psychology, of the social, economic, and 

 political sciences. The methods of discovering and establi shing general truths in 

 these sciences should have no smaller degree of interest for the logician than the 

 method of reaching, say, the law of universal gravitation. Yet the modern 

 logician tells us comparatively little about the former : about statistics and 

 averages and the canons of probability : the various means of reaching another 

 class of general truths or laws which may have immense practical interest for 

 us, even though we can have only moral, and not physical or metaphysical, 

 certitude concerning them. 



And what about the innumerable truths, or supposed truths, some of which 

 inform us of particular facts in human history, such as the conquest of Gaul 

 by Caesar, or the crucifixion of Christ ; others of which embody generalizations 

 such as that &quot; Moral excellence in men and nations results from their posses 

 sion of deep and true religious beliefs &quot; ; and all of which are accepted and 

 believed, by nine-tenths of those who do accept and believe them, on the 

 authority of their fellowmen, on the strength of historical evidence? If the 



1 C/. JOSEPH, op. cit., pp. 344, sqq. 



