GENERAL OUTLINE OF METHOD 7 



short of certitude, the general method of weighing the evidence on which they 

 are based forms the proper object of logic. 



It must be borne in mind that many of the processes to be hereafter de 

 scribed as subsidiary to induction find their application very extensively outside 

 the merely physical sciences, although they are for the most part illustrated 

 by examples drawn from the domain of these latter. 1 



202. SYNTHESIS AND ANALYSIS. Method (peOoSo^ means 

 mode or manner of procedure, and may be defined as the proper 

 arrangement of our mental processes in the discovery and proof of 

 truth. If a truth needs proving, we cannot be said to have fully 

 discovered it until we have proved or established it as a truth ; 

 antecedently to this it is only a postulate or hypothesis. The 

 method which thus leads to science is sometimes called inventive 

 or constructive, to distinguish it from the method of teaching or 

 expounding truths already established, this latter being known as 

 didactic method (204). 



In scientific method it is customary to distinguish the influ 

 ence of two great mental functions, analysis and synthesis ; and 

 according to the predominance of either of these over the other 

 in any department of scientific investigation, the latter is desig 

 nated an analytic or a synthetic science. 



When a science sets out from a few simple ideas and a few 

 necessary, universal principles, and proceeds to combine these 

 elementary notions and relations, in order to deduce from them 

 other new, less simple, more complex relations, its progress is 

 synthetic (nrvv-riffii/ju). It goes from the simple to the complex, 

 from the more general to the less general. It employs the 

 method of composition, the synthetic method. Such a science is 

 called a rational, deductive, abstract science. 



Pure mathematics, for example, sets out from a few neces 

 sary and universal principles (&quot; in materia necessaria &quot;), with which 

 the mind equips itself by the simple abstraction of a few element 

 ary concepts from the data of sense, and by direct intellectual 

 intuition of certain self-evident relations between those concepts. 

 These relations it combines and multiplies successively, thus 

 gradually forming definitions of the various thought-objects with 

 which it deals, divisions of these objects into groups or classes, 

 and demonstrations which show the relations, ever more and 

 more complex, between these objects. It is thus ever and 

 always discovering new abstract objects of thought, com- 



1 C/. JOSEPH, Logic, pp. 472 sqq. 



