SCIENCE AND DEMONSTRATION 241 



this position we do not rely on induction alone ; we reach a stage at which 

 we must substitute the simple a posteriori argument from effect to cause. 

 This we do when we pass from the special sciences, which deal with the 

 proximate causes of limited groups of phenomena, and the proximate principles 

 of special departments of knowledge, into philosophy, which aims at offering 

 an ultimate explanation of all truths and of all things as far as the human 

 mind can attain to such, by tracing all truths and all things to the One Divine 

 Being who is the First Principle of all truth and the First Cause of all created 

 reality (232). 



257. AN ERRONEOUS VIEW OF EXPLANATION. In contrast with this 

 theistic view of Explanation as a knowledge of things through their causes, 

 terminating ultimately in the recognition of a Supreme First Cause, the Deity, 

 on Whom the universe of sense depends we have the Hegelian, Idealistic 

 view of Explanation as the knowledge of things through their relations to other 

 things, terminating in the conviction that all are parts of one systematic, self- 

 existent, self-explaining whole. 1 



Writers of this school identify &quot; reality &quot; with &quot; thought,&quot; and endeavour 

 to show that &quot; things &quot; are &quot; sets of unalterable relations &quot; established or con 

 stituted by &quot; mind &quot;. The effect of this attitude on their logic is to extend the 

 necessary and universal relations which we institute between our abstract con 

 cepts, to what we call the concrete world of phenomena : in other words, to 

 assume or postulate that the world of our experience is governed by the same 

 necessary laws as govern our necessary judgments (215, 224). To suppose, thus, 

 that everything which actually exists or happens does so by the same necessity 

 by which whatever happens has a cause, by which a thing is what it is, by 

 which two and two are four, etc., is to confound the actual with the possible, 

 the existent with the merely thinkable, the physical or moral necessity which 

 governs those things and occurrences that are dependent on the Divine Will 

 and on human free will with the logical and metaphysical necessity which 

 characterizes the relations established by our thought between abstract, possible 

 essences. Hence these authors set up the strict Aristotelean concept of science 

 the knowledge by which we know that a thing &quot; cannot be otherwise than 

 it is &quot; as the ideal of all science, even of physical and moral phenomena ; 

 whereas it really applies only to those sciences which yield metaphysically 

 necessary judgments about abstract objects of thought considered by the mind 

 in a &quot; possible &quot; state, i.e. as apart from actual existence and free from all 

 change. Professor Welton, for example, lays down as a &quot; postulate of know 

 ledge &quot; in regard to the actual world, that we must assume its &quot; every detail, 

 even the smallest, as so determined by conditions that, under the circumstances, 

 it could not possibly be other than it is. That the given is necessary is an 

 assumption without which it .would be helpless to attempt to explain it, for all 

 explanation resolves itself into ascertaining the exact conditions by which the 

 given is determined. When the conditions of every detail of a phenomenon 

 are so fully and exactly known that not only a phenomenon of this general 

 character, but just this very phenomenon, with exactly these details, and 

 each in exactly this amount, must follow from those conditions and from 

 those only, then that phenomenon is fully explained. Doubtless, in the vast 



1 WELTON, Logic, ii., ch. vii., 159 ; cf. JOYCE, Principles of Logic, pp. 248- 

 5i, 338- 



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