SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 113 



even while it supplements and improves them. Most 

 philosophies hitherto have been constructed all in one 

 block, in such a way that, if they were not wholly correct, 

 they were wholly incorrect, and could not be used as a 

 basis for further investigations. It is chiefly owing to 

 this fact that philosophy, unlike science, has hitherto been 

 unprogressive, because each original philosopher has had 

 to begin the work again from the beginning, without being 

 able to accept anything definite from the work of his 

 predecessors. A scientific philosophy such as I wish to 

 recommend will be piecemeal and tentative like other 

 sciences ; above all, it will be able to invent hypotheses 

 which, even if they are not wholly true, will yet remain 

 fruitful after the necessary corrections have been made. 

 This possibility of successive approximations to the truth 

 is, more than anything else, the source of the triumphs 

 of science, and to transfer this possibility to philosophy 

 is to ensure a progress in method whose importance 

 it would be almost impossible to exaggerate. 



The essence of philosophy as thus conceived is analy- 

 sis, not synthesis. To build up systems of the world, like 

 Heine's German professor who knit together fragments of 

 life and made an intelligible system out of them, is not, 

 I believe, any more feasible than the discovery of the 

 philosopher's stone. What is feasible is the understanding 

 of general forms, and the division of traditional problems 

 into a number of separate and less baffling questions. 

 " Divide and conquer " is the maxim of success here as 

 elsewhere. 



Let us illustrate these somewhat general maxims by 

 examining their application to the philosophy of space, 

 for it is only in application that the meaning or impor- 

 tance of a method can be understood. Suppose we are 

 confronted with the problem of space as presented in 



