SECTION 32 GENERAL CONCLUSION. 413 



for them what John Stuart Mill claimed for his Canons: "The 

 mode of ascertaining those laws neither is nor can be any other 

 than the fourfold method of experimental inquiry." (Logic, 

 bk. 3, ch. 11, 1.) 



224. There is nothing in the Conclusions submitted method- 

 ised observation and computation, methodised recollection and 

 reasoning, methodised generalising and deducing, methodised 

 proving and defining, methodised application and methodised 

 resort to these Conclusions in combination and in strict sequence, 

 and a judicial and non-dogmatic attitude towards any important 

 or unimportant conclusion reached which requires any sixth 

 sense, nothing which demands powers absent in ordinary mor- 

 tals. 1 Who would seriously contend that the present practice 

 in most of the cultural sciences to frame hypotheses without 

 reference to a close study of the facts or to circumspect veri- 

 fication involves an inborn mental deficiency in those who 

 proceed in this manner? Or why should it be alleged that 

 generalising and deducing represent a process which could not 

 be methodically and successfully pursued by all normal and 

 trained individuals ? Or that systematic work generally, or that 

 objectivity, demands special aptitudes? If the marvellous 

 machines and social organisations which mankind has evolved, 

 stagger no sane individual, why should we conjecture that 

 methodological modes of procedure, which are equally the 

 outcome of ages of pan-human development, should be con- 

 genital in certain individuals and caviare to the average fully 

 trained person? In fact, when one compares men's attitude 

 towards nature and towards fables to-day and a few centuries 

 ago, it is manifest that much of scientific thinking has already, 

 where an educational system exists, penetrated into practically 

 all layers of society, and this advance betokens that there is 

 literally no limit to the general diffusion of methodological 

 modes of thinking. Those who regard the operations involved 

 in the process of discovery as a mystery, would in the past 

 have probably imagined that natural and social events are 

 originated by mysterious powers. In the one case as in the 

 other we are face to face with a transitional mode of viewing 

 the universe of things. Granted that everything valuable in 

 humanity is the product of ages of co-operative reflection, then 

 thought itself should be imagined as indefinitely improvable by 

 the gradual discovery of the most efficient ways of conducting 

 the human understanding. Superb by comparison with primitive 

 times as is our present civilisation, it will become sublime and 

 virtually divine when the twilight of variegated traditions is 



1 Our analyses of the processes involved in accuracy, resourcefulness, 

 economy, improvement, and self-training, go far towards demonstrating 

 that all proficiencies are composed of elements which any normal indivi- 

 dual can assimilate. 



