CONTENT AND VALIDITY OF THE CAUSAL LAW 355 



The conception of a methodology of scientific thought can be 

 said to be almost as old as scientific thought itself; for it is already 

 contained essentially, though undifferentiated, in the Socratic 

 challenge of knowledge. None the less, the history of methodology, 

 as the history of every other science, went through the course of 

 which Kant has given a classical description. "No one attempts 

 to construct a science unless he can base it on some idea; but in the 

 elaboration of it the schema, nay, even the definition which he gives 

 in the beginning of his science, corresponds very seldom to his idea, 

 which, like a germ, lies hidden in the reason, and all the parts of 

 which are still enveloped and hardly distinguishable even under 

 microscopical observation." 1 



We are indebted to the Greek, and especially to the Platonic- 

 Aristotelian philosophy for important contributions to the under- 

 standing of the deductive method of mathematical thought. It 

 was precisely this trend of philosophic endeavor which, though 

 furnishing for the most part the foundation of methodological 

 doctrine well on into the seventeenth century, offered no means 

 of differentiating the methods that are authoritative for our know- 

 ledge of facts. What Socrates was perhaps the first to call "induc- 

 tion," is essentially different, as regards its source and aim, from the 

 inductive methods that direct our research in natural and mental 

 science. For it is into these two fields that we have to divide the 

 totality of the sciences of facts, the material sciences, let us call 

 them, in opposition to the formal or mathematical sciences, that 

 is, if we are to do justice to the difference between sense and self- 

 perception, or "outer" and "inner" perception. 



Two closely connected forces especially led astray the methodo- 

 logical opinions regarding the material sciences till the end of the 

 eighteenth century, and in part until the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century. We refer, in the first place, to that direction of thought 

 which gives us the right to characterize the Platonic-Aristotelian 

 philosophy as a " concept philosophy;" namely, the circumstance 

 that Aristotelian logic caused the "concept" to be set before the 

 "judgment." In short, we refer to that tendency in thought which 

 directs the attention not to the permanent in the world's occurrences, 

 the uniform connections of events, but rather to the seemingly per- 

 manent in the things, their essential attributes or essences. Thus 

 the concept philosophy, as a result of its tendency to hypostasize, 

 finds in the abstract general concepts of things, the ideas, the eternal 

 absolute reality that constitutes the foundation of things and is 

 contained in them beside the accidental and changing properties. 2 



1 Kant, Kr. d. r. V., 2d ed., p. 862. 



2 According to Plato, it is true, the ideas are separated from the sensible things; 

 they must be thought in a conceptual place, for the space of sense-perception is to 



