PART V. WORKING STAGE. 



involved in the general statement. E.g., the one who framed 

 it may not have been aware of all there is known concerning 

 the subject in question; he feels constrained to skip facts yet 

 undiscovered; or he may Judge it superfluous to attempt to 

 state in his work everything relevant to the problem treated of. 

 To furnish a concrete example, Darwin was necessarily com- 

 pelled to leave his statement relating to the evolution of species 

 so incomplete that thousands of men of science have been 

 engaged since helping to complete it. Secondly, a generalisation 

 may be comparatively full, but it may yet be further exploited 

 to enable us to bring to light secondary implications. E.g., a 

 psychological statement regarding the nature of attention may 

 exhaust all that might be asserted with profit psychologically, 

 yet such a statement might be usefully applied, for instance, 

 in aesthetics, in ethics, and in pedagogy. 



The above two conditions may be fulfilled in the ensuing 

 ways: (a) by continuing to proceed inductively, and (b) by 

 proceeding deductively. 



(a) We seek to fill in the incomplete statement. We traverse 

 the ground passed over by the framer of the generalisation 

 and discover as many new and material statements as possible. 

 We similarly fit into the structure of the detailed generalisation 

 any freshly discovered facts. If only certain phases interest us, 

 as is commonly the case, we shall, of course, only re-traverse 

 the ground in the measure requisite for our purpose. Our 

 method, then, is to tread in the steps of the original investigator, 

 and, by exhausting all the methods of generalising procedure, 

 to supplement his work by appropriate minor generalisations. 



(b) We seek to extend the statement to other spheres. E.g., 

 we apply the laws of attention to pedagogy. In this process 

 we examine either (1) certain minor generalisations (e.g., in 

 the major generalisation that man is a specio-psychic being, 

 we select the minor generalisation that scientific truth is a pan- 

 human product, and, regarding it in its turn as a major generali- 

 sation, we sedulously explore it) and treat them for our 

 purposes as major generalisations which are to be probed, or 

 we take (2) the major generalisation and develop it in spheres 

 outside the particular section of science or beyond the science 

 itself, as the psychological law of attention in pedagogy. In (1) 

 we attempt what the inquirer would have essayed who had 

 made a study of the facts of how truth is produced or found, 

 save that we possess a guiding thought. That is, we examine 

 and ascertain the modes of discovering truths, and deduce a 

 series of important minor generalisations (which, in their turn, 

 can be treated as major generalisations). In (2) we apply most 

 especially the Conclusions relating to parallel instances, then 

 to degree, contradictory, contrary, opposite, etc., and proceed 

 as in (a). E.g., I examine all the instances where the attention 

 enters as a salient factor in aesthetics, or in any of the cultural 



