tasms we know well enough by nature", but he was led to neglect, 

 if not to despise the steps by which he had ascended, and he was 

 induced to predicate as the universal cause of all th ngs, motion, 

 the truth of which predication was in his eyes "known to nature", 

 known by the " natural light", self-evident, axiomatic. 1 But this 

 error of Hobbes, one which, by the way, has been made over and 

 over again, may be more readily overlooked, when one remembers 

 the keen and careful account w r hich he gives of the method of science. 

 Science, as denned above in chapter two, is the description and 

 explanation of facts obtained by observation and experiment. In 

 the performance of its work, science constantly uses analysis. It is 

 by means of analysis that description is made, for, in that way, 

 men obtain the constituents of their different sciences, with the 

 help of which they describe the complex facts which are presented. 

 Moreover, had it not been for this analytic method, there could have 

 been no differentiation into the special sciences without which no 

 advance would have been made. But not only is the scientific 

 method analytic, it is also synthetic. As man experiments, whether 

 in geometry, to use Hobbes' illustration, or in those other sciences 

 where experiment has played such an important part, as man 

 experiments, new complexes are constantly arising; the body of 

 data to be described and explained is constantly growing. Now 

 it is this aspect of experience, which, apparently, impressed Hobbes. 

 Because the geometrician produces certain effects, geometrical 

 figures, by the operation of certain causes, specific motions, which 

 effects have new properties, geometry is synthetic. It is quite 

 right to recognize such a characteristic running throughout all 

 science, but it must also be agreed that the same characteristic is 

 evident in ordinary experience as well as in science. A complex is 

 always more than the mere sum of its constituents. This law of 

 Psychical Resultants, to use a psychological term, is everywhere 

 operative, and, for that reason, it helps little, in estimating the 

 method of science, to call it synthetic in that sense. Yet Hobbes 

 accomplished much by showing that the scientific method is not 

 merely analytic. Had he paid more attention to the work of the 

 different sciences of his day he would have seen that his view of 

 synthesis was only a part-truth. 



1 Cf. De Corpore Ch. VI Par. 5. 



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