14 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



fore he had truly completed it, and consequently he would 

 lack the time to apply his conclusions systematically in several 

 directions. 



Moreover, this Methodology does not profess to furnish a 

 method whereby large numbers of important truths can be 

 arrived at by one individual ; it rather suggests that the estab- 

 lishment of comprehensive generalisations and deductions is 

 the task of ages and the effect of systematic co-operation. 

 Its aim is as much to warn against individual over-confidence 

 as to point to correct methods. Its keynote being the unity of 

 knowledge and the necessity of being satisfied with incomplete 

 conclusions for prolonged periods, no one should expect to 

 discover in these pages an imperial mint for the wholesale 

 production of scientific truths. 



Finally, theory and practice, analysis and synthesis, are not 

 identical. A good dramatic critic need not necessarily be a 

 good dramatist, nor does it follow as a matter of course that 

 a methodologist should be skilful in the application of scientific 

 methods. Indeed, the very absence of adroitness and the very 

 hesitancy in decision, not improbably provide the occasions 

 which reveal the manifold methodological factors involved in 

 scientific activity. 



The object of the methodologist is to supply the most 

 finished instrument of investigation he is capable of devising; 

 but the extensive employment of this instrument he must leave 

 to others who have not had the disadvantage of consecrating 

 a long life to its laborious construction and even more laborious 

 multiple revision. If, therefore, in the succeeding pages, most 

 of the profound observations are not original, and most of the 

 original observations are not profound, it is hoped that the 

 reader will regard this as inevitable, as in the nature of things, 

 and not as reflecting unfavourably on the endeavour to place be- 

 fore the world a comparatively ambitious work on methodology. 1 



1 See, however, the author's The Mind of Man and his The Distinctive 

 Nature of Man (shortly to be published), for an attempted application of 

 the methodological viewpoint urged in these pages. 



