190 PART IV. PREPARATORY STAGE. 



CONCLUSION 7. 



Need of recognising that Formal Rules are Barren and that 

 Psychical Prejudice is Baneful. 



81. (A) FORMAL RULES. The first half of this Con- 

 clusion may be dismissed with one or two remarks. As we 

 have seen, and as we shall see (Conclusion 23), a critical attitude 

 permeating every portion of an investigation is indispensable. 

 A danger should, however, be guarded against mere formal 

 procedure. Formally to deny, or to assert the contrary of, 

 any proposition, may even prove worse than dogmatic acqui- 

 escence in bare plausibilities. So, also, the formal piling up of, 

 say, generalisations is to be deprecated. Our attitude should 

 not be mechanical; we should rather weigh in each instance 

 the merits of our doubt, of our affirmations, and so on. To 

 call, or even to seem to call, everyone we disagree with 

 ignorant, narrow-minded, prejudiced, unpractical, or ill-man- 

 nered, is to condemn ourselves to intellectual stagnation and 

 inanity. Dogmatic denial is the younger brother of dogmatic 

 affirmation. 



82. (B) PSYCHICAL PREJUDICE. The second part of 

 our Conclusion is far-reaching in character, for without some 

 explanation such as we are about to tender, it would be difficult 

 to fathom the facility and perfection with which some of the 

 ablest minds have deceived themselves. 



How otherwise could we account for a master spirit like 

 Descartes writing to intimate friends concerning his first pub- 

 lished work (which contained the Discourse on Method, to- 

 gether with the Dioptric, the Meteors, and the Geometry) "that 

 he does not believe that there are three lines in the book which 

 can be rejected or changed; and that if there be the least 

 falsehood in any the least part of what he had published, his 

 whole philosophy was not worth a straw"? (J. P. Mahaffy, 

 Descartes, 1901, p. 72.) Kant, in the Introduction to his epoch- 

 making Kritik der reinen Vernunft, almost repeats what Des- 

 cartes affirmed of his volume. In the Preface to the first 

 edition he states: "I make bold to say that there cannot exist 

 a single metaphysical problem which is not here either solved or 

 the key to the solution of which is not at least given." And 

 in the Preface to the second edition he writes of his magnum 

 opus that "any attempt to alter the least part of it would at 

 once lead to contradictions, not only in the system but in the 

 general human understanding". And John Stuart Mill is firm 

 in regard to his Canons: "The four methods which it has now 

 been attempted to describe are the only possible modes of 

 experimental inquiry. . . . These, then, with such assistance 

 as can be obtained from deduction, compose the available 

 resources of the human mind for ascertaining the laws of the 

 succession of phenomena." (Logic, bk. 3, ch. 8, 7.) 



