BH. v.] THE TWO METHODS. 115 



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 the order of conceptions may not 

 correspond with the order of phenomena. And this view of 

 metaphysical method is grounded upon the psychological 

 error, that in our transcendental or extra-sensible conceptions 

 of Space, Time, Causality, etc., we possess " innate ideas " 

 endued with a validity quite independent of experience, so 

 that inferences logically deduced from such " innate ideas " 

 can afford to dispense with objective verification. 1 The 

 results of these incompatible teachings are written in history. 

 In science Descartes has been the forerunner of Euler, 

 D'Alembert, Lagrange, Laplace, Fresnel, Leverrier, and 

 Helmholtz : in philosophy he has been the forerunner of 

 Spinoza and Malebranche, Schelling and Hegel. 



The subjective method, as laid down by Descartes, has 

 been carried out in metaphysics by no one more rigorously 

 than by Spinoza, the most inexorable in logical consistency 

 of all metaphysicians. With mathematical nicety Spinoza 

 reasoned out a complete system of ontology, in which the 

 conclusions are so inseparably bound up with the postulates 

 that in order to overthrow them it is necessary to begin by 



- * The truth of a proposition is not given simply by showing that it is a 

 lecessary consequence from some preceding proposition ; that, is only showing 

 the logical operation to have been irreproachable ; and an operation may be 

 accurately performed although its premises are inexact." — Lewes, Problems 

 of Life and Mind, vol. i. p. 381. — Of course Descartes, as a mathematician 

 familiar with the process of reductio ad absurdum, would freely admit this. 

 But he would claim that there are sundry premises which, as being framed 

 a priori in accordance with the constitution of the thinking mind, are not 

 amenable to the jurisdiction of experience ; and that hence conclusions 

 drawn from these premises need be submitted only to a logical test. 



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