A CRITICAL EXAMINATION 13 



hirsute ornamentation of their countenances, 

 and tabulate vast statistics on the point. Yet 

 at the end he would be no nearer knowing the 

 cause of a beard on Mr. A's face, and the absence 

 of one on Mr. B's, than when he began. The law 

 of ancestral inheritance seems to be philosophi- 

 cally in much the same case. 



It should be noted that in what has just been 

 said I am referring to "description" as a working 

 method of research for the acquisition of new knowl- 

 edge, not to "description" as a general philo- 

 sophical category constituting the means of ex- 

 pression of the results of experience. There is 

 obviously a real distinction here. As a method 

 of science, description has always held an honor- 

 able place in biology. It is indispensable, but 

 not complete or final. The function of the de- 

 scriptive method, qua method, in biology would 

 appear to be essentially only to establish the 

 basis or foundation for the application of the ex- 

 perimental method, which is the only strictly 

 objective analytic tool that science has. 1 



Description as a general mode of expression of 

 experience takes a unique place in Pearson's 

 philosophy of science. His position has always 

 been that all science is nothing but description 

 and never can be anything else. This is a 



1 Cf. the recent valuable paper by Jennings: "Causes and De- 

 terminers in Radical Experimental Analysis." Amer. Nat., Vol. 

 XLVII, pp. 349-360, 1913. 



