SEPTEMBER 17, 1897. ] 
with the investigator whose energies are 
directed along a single line; and eventually, 
among the most enlightened peoples, special 
societies are formed for the purpose of fos- 
tering or diffusing discovery and invention 
and thereby rounding out the fecund plas- 
ma of human knowledge. It may be noted 
that special knowledge is nearly as barren 
and unproductive as individual knowledge, 
and is soon blasted by the poison of its own 
egoism, unless the richer part of its sub- 
stance is guided toward the general mass, 
to do work as it advances; for itis by no 
means to be forgotten that the activity of 
the great body of knowledge culminates in 
the province or zone of special knowledge, 
and that herein lies the leaven that leavens 
the whole. 
During recent centuries, and especially 
during recent decades, specialists engaged 
in creating knowledge have studied knowl- 
edge iiself in the hope of learning its nature 
and origin; and most of these students have 
become convinced that the basis of real 
knowledge is found in the facts of the cos- 
mos as revealed by observation or estab- 
lished by experimentation. So the acquisi- 
tion of knowledge begins with noting par- 
ticular facts and advances to assembling or 
grouping these facts, 7. e., proceeds from ob- 
servation to generalization; the second pro- 
cess involves the elimination of the unlike 
or incongruous, and this leads to discrim- 
ination and to the recognition of analogies. 
In general terms, and somewhat provision- 
ally, it may be said that the analogies so 
recognized constitute laws of occurrence, 
which may themselves be generalized, and 
that the requisite discrimination of anal- 
ogies leads to the recognition of homol- 
ogies, or laws of occurrence and sequence 
combined; the framing of analogies and 
homologies being legitimate inference, 
which develops in hypothesis and matures 
in theory or doctrine to be finally formu- 
lated in laws or principles. Knowledge 
SCIENCE. 
417 
produced in this regular and simple man- 
ner is commonly called inductive, though 
there is always a deductive element coming 
over from that general intellectual posses- 
sion by which even the closest specialist is 
guided in greater or less measure. Now, 
it is to be noted that acquisition of knowl- 
edge is largely spontaneous and uncon- 
scious; that apperception lags far behind 
perception, and that only the adolescent 
and mature among men and peoples are 
clearly conscious of their own mental pro- 
cesses, or, indeed, of the existence of mental 
process; it follows that most of the processes 
just outlined are ill-recognized or not recog- 
nized at all, even by the very makers of 
knowledge. Moreover, the later steps in 
intellectual acquisition are commonly the 
first to be consciously noted, so that the 
majority of men, even unto the present 
day, have failed to recognize the true source 
of real knowledge, and have appealed to 
all manner of mysterious and extravagant 
sources for part or all of the intellectual 
wealth of the world; for while the more 
complex processes alone were recognized 
inference was exalted and observation was 
contemned, subtle imagining ran riot and 
overshadowed sober reason, and scholastic 
learning—which the practical makers of 
progress fortunately ignored or repudiated 
—gerew into a labyrinth of deductions from 
vain postulates and hazy lucubrations. A 
new epoch dawned when Bacon formulated 
the inductive method, though he knew nob 
that the method was old as the human 
mind and that he but recognized that which 
all men do, whether consciously or un- 
consciously. Reviewing the course of in- 
tellectual acquisition from observation 
through generalization and inference and 
theory unto laws of occurrence and se- 
quence, knowledge may be classified by de- 
gree of development, and the simpler and 
more primitive (whether burdened by as- 
sumption or not) may be called empiric, 
