38 PART I. THE PROBLEM. 



IV. CONCLUSION. 



12. Seeing that the struggle for existence among ideas in 

 individuals and generations tends to eliminate everything that 

 is superfluous in thought and conduct, all that is merely ex- 

 planatory is of necessity forgotten, especially having regard to 

 the imperfection of our memory. Consequently the individual 

 cannot possibly think rationally or in accordance with absolutist 

 standards. Since, moreover, culture is a pan-human and pro- 

 gressive product, and its assimilation is mostly determined by 

 capricious circumstances, we readily understand the egregious 

 blunders of the child and the haphazard generalisations and ex- 

 planations of the scientifically untrained adult. Nay more, we 

 discern now that though the modern student of science is guided 

 no doubt by more efficacious rules for the conduct of particular 

 enquiries, these rules, if we take into consideration the whole 

 sphere of thought, resemble oases in an illimitable desert, or 

 tiny islands in the ocean. For this reason also those who are 

 most distinguished are under the heaviest obligation to the 

 methodological legacy of the ages. Correct and methodical 

 thinking of a general character implies manifestly a special pro- 

 cedure which no intelligence can adequately apply, save on the 

 basis of an appropriate methodology which has been scienti- 

 fically abstracted from the most successful practice of men of 

 science, which practice is itself the outcome of mankind's growing 

 and clarifying experience. 



A scientific methodology is therefore a sine qua non for rapid 

 progress. At the same time, since it is not a question of applying 

 new or rare mental powers in methodology any more than, say, 

 in machine construction, there is no reason why such a theory 

 of efficiency, pedagogically inculcated, should present in the 

 process of acquisition more obstacles than the many obscure 

 and unconnected rules which precariously pilot men's cogitations 

 in our age. Hence a high level of average thinking should 

 follow a completer systematisation of contemporary scientific 

 methods of enquiry. 



We shall conclude Part I by tracing, agreeably to the rela- 

 tivist conception verified in the preceding five Sections, the 

 historic process of methodological theory as crystallised in the 

 works of the historically most prominent methodologists. 



SECTION VI. THE PROGRESS OF METHODOLOGICAL 



THEORY. 



13. The gem of untold value in Aristotle's Organon is 

 undoubtedly his syllogism. The naming of its several parts, 

 its figures and moods, together with the establishment of the 

 nature of a good definition and a proper classification, the 

 determination of kinds of causes and of categories, an exposure 



