PART I. 

 THE PROBLEM. 



SECTION I. ABSOLUTISM AND RELATIVISM IN METHODO- 

 LOGY. 



5. The unity of the world of fact does not strike the ordi- 

 nary observer, because for his purposes a world divided and 

 subdivided into many independent parts and compartments is a 

 more profitable conception. Slight variations, border instances, 

 minute, remote, and invisible objects, as well as slow trans- 

 formations, escape him. Such being the case, it was natural 

 that the pioneer logicians of the West should have unsuspect- 

 ingly assumed that the ordinary spectator's point of view is 

 the correct one, and that they should have consequently taken 

 for granted the existence of the world of common sense, that 

 is, of a world composed of isolated objects and isolated classes 

 of objects with features too plain to be overlooked. This mode 

 of apprehending facts supplied a rigid criterion for the pro- 

 cesses of reasoning, and hence followed the absolutist character 

 of the older logic. A trait of this kind, since it appeared to 

 ensure certainty, was, reasonably enough, cherished beyond 

 anything else in the armoury of logic. 



Francis Bacon, although he ardently expressed his belief in 

 "progressive stages of certainty", only fitfully applied this 

 pregnant conception of his. The notion of the correlation and 

 unity of the natural forces and -of phenomena generally, or of 

 the ultimate relations and reducibility of the elements, did not 

 suggest itself to him. It is true that he boldly sought for the 

 "simple natures" of things, 1 and that nothing less than the 

 discovery of these would satisfy him ; but it was simple natures 

 heaviness, malleability, fixity, fluidity, colour, etc., which he 

 was bent on discovering, not simple nature, nor did he appar- 

 ently suspect that the molecular world was the world of master 

 facts, and that this world could only be approached with the 

 greatest difficulty, if at all. For this reason he, like Aristotle, 

 believed in the molar and compartment theory of the world 

 and of the mind, and to this is partly attributable his exagge- 

 rated opinion as to what a perfected scientific method might 



1 Francis Bacon frequently employs the term Form, and he offers as 

 equivalents of this term nature, law, simple nature, specific difference, true 

 definition, etc. By Form he almost certainly means what in modern ter- 

 minology is called Natural Law. (Novum Organum, bk. 2, 3.) 



