SUCTION '.-CONCLUSION OF PART I. 53 



stood that men acquainted closely with science, like Whewell 

 and Jevons, who were not psychologists, should be unaware 

 of the methods which they resort to in scientific enquiries, and 

 that spectators, like John Stuart Mill, who discern only the 

 final product, and that through the glasses of classicism, should 

 not be explicit concerning the complex process which precedes 

 the final drawing of a conclusion. 



SECTION VII. CONCLUSION. 



18. In the preceding Sections it was explained wherein 

 the problem of methodology lies. Individual minds left to their 

 own devices, we learnt, are lost in clouds of words, and are 

 prone to evolve error rather than truth. Thinking, however, 

 in concert, men correct one another, and gradually, through 

 the ages, develop methodological traditions of an increasingly 

 higher order. Yet since these traditions lack unity, because 

 each of them has developed in materially different circum- 

 stances, they cannot be readily applied to new problems, nor 

 can they be convincingly and systematically communicated. 



Concurrently, and keeping pace with the growth of these 

 traditions, more or less crude systems of methodology, we 

 observed, develop, and then pass away into more or less im- 

 proved systems. The first impulse, encouraged by the belief, 

 due to limited experience and naive desires, that the world of 

 fact is devoid of complexity, was tacitly to postulate that final 

 truth is the goal of the man of science, and accordingly the 

 logic, associated for us with the name of Aristotle, held sway 

 for a score of centuries. Indeed even now works on logic 

 frequently regard the subjective intelligence and the objective 

 world as if their processes could be neatly analysed and sepa- 

 rated, at least by superior minds. So strong has been the 

 primitive absolutist influence that methodological thinkers of 

 later times, such as Descartes and Mill, oblivious of the changes 

 wrought by time in the scientific conception of the world, strove 

 to extend the old logical methods without attempting to shake 

 the principle of absolutism or finalism in knowledge and thought. 

 Only one eminent methodologist, Francis Bacon, explicitly re- 

 cognised that the complexity of facts required methods which 

 should accommodate themselves to the various imperfect phases 

 of a scientific enquiry, and that such methods were not given, 

 but had to be laboriously found. Lacking such a relativist 

 foundation in harmony with the data and the needs of modern 

 science, logic fell into disrepute, and the problem of this treatise 

 is therefore, on the basis of the recognition of the socio-historic 

 and consequently relativist nature of thought, to elaborate 

 a scientific methodology, and thus to re-instate logic into its 

 exalted position as the mistress of the sciences. 



