HYPOTHESIS 



129 



recent times it was the fashion with modern philosophers and scientists, in their 

 boasted ignorance of mediaeval thought, to impute this and all manner of ab 

 surdities to Scholasticism generally, and with the inevitable result that the 

 ridicule they heaped upon their predecessors is now seen in the light of history 

 to recoil upon their own heads. The thirteenth-century Scholastics, no less 

 than their later critics, realized the importance of observation and experiment, 

 the necessity of noting analogies between phenomena, of endeavouring by ana 

 lysis of these analogies to reduce gradually, as far as possible, the number of 

 distinct &quot; forces,&quot; or &quot; powers &quot; postulated for the explanation of phenomena. 

 They were never content to refer each separate phenomenon in nature to a 

 distinct and corresponding cause supposed to be capable of producing that effect 

 alone to be sui generis, so to speak. They pushed investigation as far as the 

 conditions of their time permitted. And those who, in modern times, have in 

 herited the best traditions of Scholasticism, have always welcomed every careful 

 attempt of the positive and experimental sciences to unify our experience of 

 external nature by tracing large and varied and apparently unconnected fields 

 of phenomena to the operation of some one or some few common &quot; agencies &quot;. 

 They have nothing but approval for the methods whereby scientists have for 

 mulated and tested hypotheses for the exploration of hitherto unsuspected natural 

 &quot; forces,&quot; or for the explanation of phenomena by referring these to already 

 known &quot; causes,&quot; with which such phenomena were previously thought to have 

 no connexion. They themselves adopt these methods in physical science. 

 They are not content to say that the varied phenomena of external nature must 

 have causes, must be due to the operation and co-operation of nature s 

 forces and agencies. They endeavour to discover in what groups of pheno 

 menal antecedents the agencies productive of a given effect are operative. 

 They try to bring to light &quot; the sum-total of the [phenomenal, perceptible] con 

 ditions, positive and negative taken together, the whole of the contingencies of 

 every description, which being realized the consequent [effect or phenomenon] 

 invariably follows &quot; which is Mill s own conception of the discovery of a 

 &quot;cause&quot;. 1 And it is only when the inductive methods fail for want of ana 

 logies on which to base hypotheses, i.e. in investigating the remoter causes of 

 wider fields of phenomena, and the Ultimate Cause of the whole phenomenal 

 universe, that they use the simple a posteriori argument to prove that such re 

 moter causes and such Ultimate Cause must exist, and to discover about 

 the nature of these just as much as the effects will warrant us in attributing 

 to the latter. 



But Scholastics have held to the doctrine that while the senses stop at 

 phenomena, intellect or reason can discover, in these phenomena, &quot;substances,&quot; 

 &quot; causes,&quot; &quot; faculties,&quot; &quot; forces,&quot; which constitute and permeate the world of 

 sense experience, and which reveal themselves to intellect by acting in and 

 through the phenomena of sense. And they have held to this doctrine in 

 obedience to such self-evident dictates of reason as that &quot; every event must 



just quite as occult, in their own hypotheses. &quot; How could masses and motions that 

 must remain occult be anymore acceptable . . . than the occult powers of the ancient 

 Scholasticism ? &quot; DUHEM, L Evolution de lamecaniqtie, p. 190. Cf. Dublin Review , 

 April, 1906, pp. 332, 337, where Professor Windle suggests a comparison of some of 

 Weismann s hypotheses with the famous virtus dormativa. 

 1 Logic, iii., v., 3. 

 VOL. II. 9 



