242 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



majority of cases such thoroughness ... is not attained. . . . But the ideal 

 of explanation is the same : it is thorough in so far as the given can be shown 

 to be the necessary consequence of certain definite and necessary conditions. 1 1 l 

 The &quot; necessity &quot; referred to here is that which characterizes science in 

 the strict Aristotelean sense, whereby we are said to know a thing scientifically 

 when we know that it &quot; cannot possibly be other than it is &quot;. To demand 

 such &quot; necessity &quot; as a hall-mark of all scientific explanation is tantamount to 

 a declaration that we can have no scientific knowledge of the concrete, actual, 

 existing world at all, but only of the abstract, possible objects of thought con 

 ceived by our own intellects. 



Father Joyce, in his Principles of Logic? contrasts this [Idealistic] account 

 of explanation, as that of the part by the whole of an organism, with the 

 Scholastic [Theistic] account, as that of effect by cause in an organization. Of 

 course, the Idealist conception of the universe as one in nature or being 

 (Monism, Pantheism}, and not merely one in order (a &quot; Cosmos &quot; distinct 

 from the Infinite Being who created it ; Dualism, Theism), and of individual 

 &quot; things &quot; and &quot; events &quot; as not really distinct from one another, but as made 

 up of groups of &quot; relations &quot; conceived by that one Mind, which is the world 

 such a conception is entirely erroneous. 3 But its evil effect on the doctrines 

 of &quot; Explanation,&quot; &quot; Demonstration,&quot; and &quot; Science &quot; is to narrow these con 

 cepts unduly by setting up for them too exacting and even impossible ideals, 

 rather than, as Father Joyce states, to make them purely provisional and involve 

 them in an endless regress. Even in the Scholastic view of explanation there 

 is a true sense in Mr. Bosanquet s remark that &quot; nothing can be known 

 rightly, without knowing all else rightly &quot; ; 4 for, all research into the ultimate 

 reason of logical first principles and other axiomatic truths leads us ultimately 

 to the Divine Intellect ; and all research into the ultimate causes of existing 

 things leads us ultimately to the Divine Will ; and we take it that Divine 

 Wisdom has so planned the created cosmos, and interrelated its parts, that the 

 whole might be understood in the part, and the part in the whole, if these 

 were known &quot;rightly,&quot; i.e. comprehensively; but to know them thus would 

 be to see into the Fiat of the Divine Will, which is proper to God alone : the 

 only &quot; must &quot; the only &quot; necessity &quot; there can be in actual things and events, 

 past, present, future, is that they must be as God freely wills them to be (224). 

 Since the immediate causes of any individual phenomenon depend on 

 remote ones, and these on remoter ones still ; and since in this way no indi 

 vidual phenomenon in nature is isolated, but each is bound up with the others : 

 zfull and complete knowledge of any one would necessitate a like knowledge 

 of all nature. If, therefore, the latter were regarded, according to the Mon 

 istic view, as a closed system subject to absolute logical necessity or determinism, 

 and if we were certain of the truth of this view as we are of its falsity, we 

 could entertain hopes of a complete and perfect knowledge of all reality ; and 

 our knowledge of physical causation would be an absolutely certain knowledge 

 of an absolutely necessary relation between phenomena. Few, however, have 

 the hardihood to put forward such a claim. &quot; As the universe is a systematic 



1 op. cit., vol. ii., pp. 188-9 (italics ours). 2 pp. 338-9. 



3 A trenchant and destructive analysis of these Neo-Hegelian views will be 

 found in Professor Veitch s Knowing and Being (Blackwood, 1889). 



4 Logic, p. 393, apud JOYCE, ibid. 



