SECTION 9.OBSERVA TION. 7 7 



sophy, are exact anticipations of Shakespeare, and, but for the 

 unavoidably primitive verse and its consequences, the play 

 is superior to sundry of Shakespeare's earlier works. 



Shakespeare soars immeasurably above what our present-day 

 drama offers, because our drama is immeasurably inferior to 

 the drama of Shakespeare's time. What has been asserted of 

 his plays by perfervid admirers is roughly correct; but the 

 true author of these plays was an age, and not an individual. 

 This explains why his age failed to take our age's view of 

 Shakespeare, and why he himself appeared to be unconscious 

 of greatness, and lived and died conventionally. 



The Shakespeare problem offers accordingly a superb illus- 

 tration of the indispensability of an exhaustive study of facts 

 when a serious issue is to be elucidated, and the fatal effects of 

 striving to remove difficulties by speculative considerations. 



24. Where, then, a process is highly complex, such as 

 that of observation, the doctrine of method must needs frame 

 or discover canons which shall effectively deal with this pro- 

 cess. Else the other canons will be infected at the source. 

 The perfection of the process of observation should be con- 

 ceived accordingly as the corner stone of the correct method 

 of investigation. 1 Scientific advance has meant keener and 

 keener, closer and closer, wider and wider, more and more 

 varied, observation. Of course, where much scientific obser- 

 vation has preceded the initiation of an enquiry into a certain 

 subject, we may postulate much ; and it is exceptional illustra- 

 tions, drawn from highly developed and simple sciences, which 

 have deluded men into thinking that it is safe and profitable 

 to generalise on the basis of comparatively few instances. The 

 opposite cases are disregarded where observation imposes a 

 gigantic task in a novel enquiry, rendering it impossible to gene- 

 ralise even tentatively, save after exceedingly wide and varied 

 observation by many persons under changing conditions of time, 

 place, motive, habit, or other circumstances. 



If what appears to us a "natural" object is as we have learnt 

 in the preceding Section a highly "artificial" and largely arbi- 

 trary product of the mind, it is truer still that observation, whose 

 scope is much ampler, entails as a rule extensive mental activities. 

 We might define the process of observation as that part of an 

 enquiry which aims primarily at the accurate determination of 

 detailed facts. If many logicians only burn incense before the 

 altar of deduction, and reason that a bold guess and subsequent 

 verification represent the true method of science, a study of 

 contemporary scientific procedure will convict them of being 

 idolaters. As a matter of fact, the weather-stained bones of slain 

 theories, which thickly strew the fields of history, should make 



l> We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does 

 or may be made to do." (Bacon, Novnm Organum, bk, 2, 10.) 



