SECTION 20. STUDIES PREPARATORY TO ALL INVESTIGATIONS. 181 



since sufficient general progress has been made to permit the 

 inquirer to pass down almost every great avenue of thought and 

 life from mathematics to politics. Perhaps a day may arrive 

 when an international academy, having the progress of science 

 in trust and at heart, will sketch, without prescribing, the chan- 

 nels in which research at any period can be most profitably 

 directed, and may coordinate the labours undertaken collec- 

 tively or individually. In our day, and probably for some appre- 

 ciable time to come, this has to be left almost altogether to 

 hazard (Conclusion 12), and nothing can be done except to urge 

 that an important enquiry should be only initiated after ade- 

 quately considering the general contemporary condition of 

 science, and the predilection, preparedness, opportunities, and 

 resources of the inquirer ( 86). 



CONCLUSION 5. 

 Need of a Simple Starting-Point. 



79. This is a Conclusion the practical importance of which 

 can scarcely be exaggerated. Its principal object is to emphasise 

 the historical and pan-human nature of truth, and to warn 

 against precipitate attempts at reaching conclusions prematurely. 

 Bacon desired to make all knowledge his province; Descartes 

 contemplated the same end ; and philosophers, generally speak- 

 ing, have often evinced no adequate appreciation of the mea- 

 sured growth of truth through the ages. The question, then, 

 raised by this Conclusion is When may we legitimately institute 

 an investigation? Shall we begin with the simplest facts or 

 with the most complex ones ? Shall we take up problems where 

 others have left them, or shall we disregard the efforts of 

 others? Or does the starting-point not matter? 



In Section IV we learnt that in spite of the fact that men 

 had always attempted to resolve problems of every grade of 

 intricacy, and preferably the more intricate ones, the history 

 of science unmistakably evidences that all endeavours to grapple 

 with the more intricate problems before the simpler ones, have, 

 without exception, issued hitherto in failure, and that the body 

 of scientific knowledge has historically grown from the simple 

 to the complex. 1 The conclusion is therefore irresistible that 

 any breaking loose from organic succession with past scientific 



1 This determinate sequence is well expressed by Henry Balfour, in the 

 Introduction to a work by A. Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, on the Evolution of 

 Culture, 1906. "Every form [in cultural products] marks its own place in 

 sequence by its relative complexity or affinity to other allied forms, in the 

 same manner that every word in the science of language has a place as- 

 signed to it in the order of development or phonetic decay." (P. 12.) "Pro- 

 gress is like a game of dominoes like fits on to like. In neither case can 

 we tell beforehand what will be the ultimate figure produced by the ad- 

 hesions; all we know is that the fundamental rule of the game is sequence." 

 (P. 19.) 



