SECTION 22.OBSERVA T10N. 289 



Scientific canons, therefore, demand that vigorous and rigorous 

 objective examination of the facts and conditions should be 

 accompanied by vigorous and rigorous subjective analysis and 

 reconstruction of facts and conditions so far as known. The 

 imagination is observable in action to the best advantage in 

 the contriving of experiments, the drawing of deductions, and 

 in the formulation of definitions. 



144. (D) CONTINUOUS METHODOLOGICAL CONTROL 

 OF THE THOUGHT PROCESS. The emergence of a felt need 

 gives automatically rise to the problem of how it may be gratified. 

 If that problem be ideally simple, as when we desire to touch 

 some common object within convenient reach of the hands, 

 the task of the intelligence is minimal ; but when, for instance, 

 we wish to comprehend the inmost nature of reality, satisfaction 

 can only be secured, if at all, by the combined efforts of 

 the thinkers of myriads of ages. Customarily, however, the 

 problems posed by needs are such that a brief period of 

 reasoning suffices to reach the conclusion or end aimed at. 

 Thus when we desire to know how long it will occupy us to 

 complete some piece of work, or what shall be our next task, 

 or what we shall write to a colleague, or where we shall spend 

 the vacations, or how we shall furnish our laboratory, or what 

 shall be the contents of a memoir we contemplate presenting 

 to a learned body, we reason and labour for a shorter or longer 

 space of time, until a provisional or final decision is arrived 

 at and the need is at least partially satisfied. In the process 

 of reasoning the stimulating need is teleologically connected 

 with a seemingly appropriate detail recollected, that with another, 

 and so on with scores of memories, the controlling stimulus 

 remaining as a constant, till the need is satisfied so far as 

 circumstances permit. Reasoning being hence dependent on a 

 succession of relevant memories, it is readily appreciated that, 

 in the absence of deliberate and correct methodological training, 

 countless causes may contribute to prolong and sophisticate a 

 train of reasoning. On this account, the conclusion may be 

 instantaneously reached; it may not be reached at all; or a 

 partially or wholly false conclusion may be the fruit of our 

 cogitations. 1 



In a certain sense we are supposed to deal in this Sub-Section 

 with the methodological process in its naked concreteness, as it 

 proceeds from moment to moment in the act of ratiocination. As 

 we have seen, the very fact that man's thought is as yet almost 

 wholly unorganised, renders it abundantly clear that what takes 

 place in the mind must vary alarmingly from individual to indivi- 

 dual, that most of the ideas occurring are chance products, and 



1 See Mind of Man, ch. 4, for an analysis of the reasoning process. From 

 this statement it will be seen that the laws of association by contiguity and 

 by similarity are only secondary laws and do not account for the flow of 

 thought. 



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