THE AIM AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD. 3 



i an easy extension of its meaning the adjective is applied to all 

 processes by which knowledge is reached having the security 

 . that is thought to characterise " Science." Hence " scientific i1 

 comes to be wider in its application than " Science " to have) 

 in fact much the same range and implication as the German 

 "Wiflsenschaft" which, as Merz points out,*' has acquired 

 a moral as well as an intellectual significance, and implies an 

 ideal embracing at once the highest aims of the " exact " (i.e. 

 " scientific " in the narrower sense precisely correlative to 

 " Science "), the historical, and the philosophical lines of thought. 

 ^7 To distinguish it from this use of " scientific " as implying an 

 ideal of exact knowledge of things as they really are, free from 

 conjecture and subjective distortion, we may perhaps assert 

 that the typical use of " philosophical " is to imply a certain 

 breadth of knowledge and of view, an ability to deal with new 

 problems by the help of considerations drawn from a large- 

 mass of well-ordered experience and instructed thought. 

 Thus, while, according to modern usage, - the 1 substantives 

 " Science " and " Philosophy " undoubtedly refer to different 

 provinces on the map of intellectual effort, however difficult 

 it may be to delimitate their frontiers, the corresponding 

 adjectives are, in general, not so restricted in their application, 

 but are commonly used to characterise aspects of intellectual 

 effort wherever it is exercised. Nevertheless they have special 

 senses in which they correspond precisely to their nouns, and 

 it should be understood that it is in this narrower sense 

 precisely correlative to the noun " Science " that the term 

 " scientific " is used in these pages a sense which it will be 

 necessary to determine with some care. The first and second 

 of the following chapters will be devoted to this task of 

 determining the aims of Science, while in the remaining 

 chapters a critical estimate of the achievements of Science will 

 be attempted. 



* Op. tit., i, p. 223. See also index s.v. " Wissenschaft." 



B 2 



