412 PART VIL GENERAL CONCLUSION. 



PART VII. 

 GENERAL CONCLUSION. 



SECTION XXXII. -GENERAL CONCLUSION. 



223. Regarded as a connected body of precepts, the fore- 

 going thirty-six Conclusions will probably be acknowledged as 

 novel in the aggregate; but, historically speaking, they only 

 seek to register the general advance of science. They attempt 

 to perform for modern methodology what Bacon initiated, but, 

 owing to a cruel fate and to the backwardness of the sciences 

 of his time, did not consummate. They allow for the process 

 of deduction and of mathematical treatment which Descartes 

 championed. They recognise the historic and organic continuity 

 of scientific discoveries. They encourage the conduct of en- 

 quiries as comprehensive and manifold as the development of 

 the sciences at any period permits, enquiries occupying, if 

 practicable, the space of a life-time. And, in respect of an 

 ultimate aim, they, in a modern way, seek, as the precepts of 

 Bacon and Descartes did, to improve human life in general. 1 

 Bacon, guided by a very small number of highly developed 

 sciences, was at a distinct disadvantage in constructing his 

 methodology. In this we are more favourably placed. 2 How- 

 ever, the author is far from assuming that the Conclusions 

 formulated in this treatise uniformly reflect, as in a faithful 

 mirror, scientific procedure at its best. He feels too deeply 

 conscious of their incompleteness and imperfection, to claim 



1 "The true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this : that 

 human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers." (Bacon, Novum 

 Organum, bk. 1, 81.) "The project of a universal science which can raise 

 our nature to its highest degree of perfection." (Mahaffy, Descartes, p. 65.) 

 "There cannot be a greater mistake than that of looking superciliously upon 

 practical applications of science. The life and soul of science is its practi- 

 cal application, and just as the great advances in mathematics have been 

 made through the desire of discovering the solution of problems which were 

 of a highly practical kind in mathematical science, so in physical science 

 many of the greatest advances that have been made from the beginning of 

 the world to the present time have been made in the earnest desire to turn 

 the knowledge of the properties of matter to some purpose useful to man- 

 kind." (Lord Kelvin, Constitution of Matter, pp. 86-87.) Contrast these 

 citations with the first sentence of Poincare's La valeur de la science: "La 

 recherche de la verite doit etre le but de notre activite; c'est la seule fin 

 qui soit digne d'elle "; but possibly Poincare included in his affirmation both 

 theoretical and practical truths. 



2 "A technical science appears after the art with which it is concerned, 

 has been for some time practised, and it reduces to rules that which has 

 already been successfully carried out by proficients in the art." (Sigwart, 

 Logic, vol. 2, p. 20.) Accordingly, the task of the twentieth century methodo- 

 logist is manifestly far simpler than that of the seventeenth century methodo- 

 logist. 



