THE CONTENT AND VALIDITY OF THE CAUSAL LAW 



BY BENNO ERDMANN 



(Translated from the German by Professor Walter T. Marvin, Western Reserve 



University) 



[Benno Erdmann, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bonn, since 1898. 

 b. October 5, 1851, Glogau in Schlesien, Germany. Ph.D.; Privy Councilor. 

 Academical Lecturer, Berlin, 1876- ; Special Professor, Kiel, 1878-79; 

 Regular Professor, ibid. 1879-84; ibid. Breslau, 1884-90; ibid. Halle, 1890- 

 98. Member various scientific and learned societies. Author of The Axioms 

 of Geometry; Kant's Criticism; Logic; Psychological Researches on Reading 

 (together with Prof. Ramon Dodge); The Psychology of the Child and the 

 School; Historical Researches on Kant's Prolegomena, and many other works 

 and papers in Philosophy.] 



WE have learned to regard the real, which we endeavor to appre- 

 hend scientifically in universally valid judgments, as a whole that is 

 connected continuously in time and in space and by causation, and 

 that is accordingly continuously self-evolving. This continuity of 

 connection has the following result, namely, every attempt to classify 

 the sum total of the sciences on the basis of the difference of their 

 objects leads merely to representative types, that is, to species which 

 glide into one another. We find no gaps by means of which we can 

 separate sharply physics and chemistry, botany and zoology, political 

 and economic history and the histories of art and religion, or, again, 

 history, philology, and the study of the prehistoric. 



As are the objects, so also are the methods of science. They are 

 separable one from another only through a division into represent- 

 ative types; for the variety of these methods is dependent upon the 

 variety of the objects of our knowledge, and is, at the same time, 

 determined by the difference between the manifold forms of our 

 thought, itself a part of the real, with its elements also gliding into 

 one another. 1 



The threads which join the general methodology of scientific 

 thought with neighboring fields of knowledge run in two main direc- 

 tions. In the one direction they make up a closely packed cable, 

 whereas in the other their course diverges into all the dimensions 

 of scientific thought. That is to say, first, methodology has its roots 

 in logic, in the narrower sense, namely, in the science of the element- 

 ary forms of our thought which enter into the make-up of all scien- 

 tific methods. Secondly, methodology has its source in the methods 

 themselves which actually, and therefore technically, develop in the 



1 Cf. the author's "Theorie der Typeneinteilungen," Philosophische Monat- 

 shefte, vol. xxx, Berlin, 1894. 



