52 The Concept of Method 



the principle of Causation. The old method of science had for 

 its goal the collection and classification of an infinite number of 

 particular phenomena per enumcrationem simpUcem, their sub- 

 sumption under more or less general concepts, and the consequent 

 deduction of the validity of particulars. Such activity has its 

 value as a necessary step in scientific procedure, but it is neither 

 the beginning nor the end of scientific or philosophical investiga- 

 tion. The modern philosophy of science goes farther, and at- 

 tempts to relate these various classifications of concepts in a sys- 

 tem of laws based upon the general principle of Causation, which 

 is regarded as a necessary condition of existence and a criterion 

 of the possibility of human experience. Hitherto the conception 

 of Causation has been worked out with greatest definiteness and 

 with mathematical accuracy in the mechanical sciences, but it 

 is no less a fundamental principle in Biology, Psychology, Soci- 

 ology, Education, and Ethics, though in each of these the par- 

 ticular form in which the principle manifests itself varies. This 

 much may be postulated without involving the mechanism of a 

 fatalistic interpretation of experience, nor limiting the definite 

 sphere within which the alternatives of human choice must lie, 

 while at the same time preserving that freedom of the social per- 

 sonality which Idealism demands. Evolution from one point of 

 view receives philosophical justification in that it is one mani- 

 festation of causality, and is therefore a necessary condition of 

 experience. It scarcely admits of exact expression as a mathe- 

 matical formula because, though the antecedent and consequent 

 conditions can perhaps be represented quantitatively with more 

 or less adequacy, it is impossible to express their actual relation 

 and at the same time include all the conditions of variation in the 

 equation. 



Since, therefore, Evolution has a philosophical basis and justi- 

 fication as a condition of the possibility of experience, its signifi- 

 cance as a subjective regulative principle has an obvious im- 

 portance for education. The principle is brought still more into 

 relation with the general aim of our philosophy when we regard 

 it as a method of bringing inherent order out of apparent chaos, 

 for that is what philosophers in every age have been trying to 

 accomplish from time immemorial, searching in a veritable in- 

 tellectual Slough of Despond for a unity in diversity, the one in 

 the many, or the universal in a bewildering muddle of particulars. 



