COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



Bacon's achievements rests upon a not unnat- 

 ural confusion between the subjective and the 

 deductive methods. The subjective method is 

 indeed mainly deductive, but that is not the 

 source of its weakness. It is not in reasoning 

 downward from a general proposition to a spe- 

 cial conclusion that the danger lies. The dan- 

 ger is in reasoning from an unverified premise 

 to a conclusion which you do not stop to ver- 

 ify. Here we come upon the weak point in the 

 system of Descartes. A mathematician whose 

 genius and achievements have perhaps never 

 been equalled save by Newton, Leibnitz, and 

 Lagrange, — Descartes was not likely to under- 

 rate the value of deduction ; but he overlooked 

 the necessity for constant verification. Though 

 his scientific career was far more brilliant than 

 Bacon's, — if, indeed, the latter can be said to 

 have had any scientific career, — his concep- 

 tion of philosophy was far less defensible than 

 Bacon's conception. He admitted the necessity 

 of verification in the so-called physical sciences ; 

 but between physiology and psychology he 

 drew an arbitrary line, and thought that In the 

 so-called moral sciences which lie beyond that 

 line verification might safely be dispensed with. 

 Here, in this higher region, he said, all we have 

 to do is first clearly to conceive some premise, 

 and then to reason away ad libitum, as in mathe- 

 matics, never fearing that th* order of concep- 

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