SECTION 21. -PRECISE NATURE OF PROBLEM TO BE INVESTIGA TED. 245 



of human groups, increasingly to satisfy human nature through 

 co-operation"; and one might join to this the practical deduc- 

 tion "until, in the place of the unreasoned need of the moment, 

 which almost exclusively dominates the individual in the first 

 stages of human development, the ideal of the complete and 

 correlated solidarity of the self and of mankind rules undisturbed 

 in man and human nature is completely satisfied"- The value 

 of aiming at, and reaching, comprehensive definitions of this 

 character can scarcely be exaggerated. We must become again, 

 but on a higher plane, dialecticians and scholastics. Moreover, 

 the wholesome caution and thoroughness involved in the fram- 

 ing of definitions, point to their being imperative throughout 

 every stage of an enquiry, more especially for deductive pur- 

 poses. 1 



111. (C) DEFINITENESS IN SCIENTIFIC WORK GENE- 

 RALLY. Similarly, this tendency towards definiteness should 

 throughout stamp the activities of the man of science, because 

 without it there can be no decisive advance, and since con- 

 fusion is an even deadlier foe to truth than error. A famous 

 example of definiteness in method, which has been often quoted, 

 is that of the discovery of the manner in which dew is deposited 

 on plants. For over half a century, till 1885, Wells' theory was 

 thus not only accepted but admired. Yet the fact that plants 

 differed from all non-living objects in that they were animate 

 and that they were normally rooted in the ground, was uni- 

 formly overlooked a significant illustration of the absence of a 

 rigorously scientific method of enquiry in our day. This was, 

 of course, more pardonable in older writers. Van Helmont 

 (born 1577) thus reasoned that plants obtain all their constituents 

 from water. In proof he cited an experiment of his own. He 

 had planted a willow weighing 5 Ibs. in 200 Ibs. of earth. 

 After 5 years the willow weighed over 169 Ibs. and the earth 

 had only lost 2 ounces. Ergo, he reasoned, roots and wood 

 are transformed water. The transformability of the all-enfold- 

 ing air had necessarily escaped his attention. 



The advance of science is distinguished by greater knowledge 

 leading to greater definiteness e.g., "the molecule has been 

 raised from a conception only realisable experimentally in mil- 



1 The following definitions may prove useful. "A fact, in the scientific 

 sense of the word, is the close agreement of many observations or measure- 

 ments of the same phenomena." "A class, in the scientific sense of the 

 word, is a plural number of facts that resemble one another in some given 

 point or number of points." "A generalisation, in the scientific sense of 

 the word, is an affirmation that a constant relation exists between an unvary- 

 ing class of facts and some unvarying fact not in the class, or between one 

 unvarying class of facts and some other unvarying class." "A law, in the 

 scientific sense of the word, is an affirmation of a constant relation between 

 a fact of variation and some other fact of variations, or between a class of 

 variations and some other class ot variations." (F. H. Giddings, Inductive 

 Sociology, 1901.) 



