GROWTH AND DIFFUSION OF CRITICAL SPIRIT. 101 



started for exact philosophy, and where the new school of 

 psychology, heralded hy Fechner, and brilliantly repre- 

 sented by Wundt and his pupils, was put forward as a 

 kind of opposition to the older metaphysical methods 

 which were considered obsolete and misleading. I have 

 had occasion to refer to this school of thought in the 

 eleventh chapter of the first section, where I treated of 

 the psychophysical view of nature. I have there also 

 referred to the restricted area within which the new 

 methods have been successfully applied. Nor is it 

 difficult to find the reason why these attempts, which 

 were frequently put forward with so much self-assurance, 

 have on the whole failed. What I have said in the s. 



. Reason of 



introduction to the second part of this History about the their failure. 

 difference between philosophy and science, between mind 

 and nature, contains an explanation of the point in 

 question. The exact methods of science, whether they 

 consist in observation, measurement, or calculation, or 

 in the combination of all three processes, can only be 

 successfully applied to things or phenomena which have 

 a definite location in space or in space and time. 

 Definition in this sense is the first condition of the 

 scientific process ; nor would the scientific worker be 

 satisfied if this fixing of his object in time and space 

 were merely the result of one or a few observations and 

 their record. The scientific mind is nowadays so fully 

 aware of the numberless subjective and casual influences 

 which tend to vitiate or make uncertain every single 

 observation,^ that one of the first requisites is to 



^ Not only is the subjective char- 

 acter of single observations fully 

 recognised and corrections every- 



where introduced, but even pro- 

 cesses of logical deduction in some 

 of the purely mathematical sciences 



