Thoughts on Causality, 



237 



of so doing must not generate a belief that the assumption 

 represents a verity. Science may forbear to inquire — nay, 

 in its own character it cannot inquire, whether efficient 

 causation inheres in the material substance back of the 

 phenomenon which stands as invariable antecedent ; or 

 whether the remotest phenomenal antecedent reached by 

 science represents substantial first cause. Should the 

 scientist refrain from instituting such inquiries, he should 

 neither be reproached, on the one hand, with the charge 

 of apathy touching questions of primary causation, nor 

 himself commit the mistake, on the other, of assuming 

 that inquiries in his actual field have led him to real causes. 

 Still less should he dogmatically deny that real causation 

 is posited outside of the phenomenal world in which his 

 labors are conducted — beyond the last term which he has 

 discovered with his microscope, or dissolved in his alembic, 

 or discerned with the Vorstellungskraft of his imagination. 



The method of science, I repeat, is chiefly inductive ; 

 that of philosophy, chiefly deductive. The science of anti- 

 quity and of the middle ages was essentially a body of 

 conclusions derived deductively ; and the inevitable and 

 glaring absurdities of the method and its results, contrasted 

 with the brilliant successes of the inductive method of 

 modern times, have caused many scientists to look upon 

 deductive processes with an unmerited degree of distrust, 

 or even disdain. This has led them, since scientific induc- 

 tion cannot be carried into the field of first principles, to 

 reject as unsafe and unworthy of consideration, the result 

 of a 'priori reasoning. Hence has sprung up the miscalled 

 "positive philosophy." This tendency has gone too far, 

 and it is quite time to return to the natural method, which 

 appreciates and weighs with impartiality the evidence 

 afforded both by reason and the senses ; and does not re- 

 fuse to search for causes in the realm of immaterial things 

 because there they would elude the verification of the 

 crucible and the balance. Deduction, dealing with neces- 



