Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/510

IV. THE NORMAL SELF : A SUGGESTED FORM- ULA FOR EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS. BY E. E. MARETT. To Plato and Aristotle, working upon a suggestion derived from Socrates, we owe the formulation of the logical method of Definition. Definition implies a static view of pheno- mena. Its interest in them relates entirely to that aspect wherein they lire stable, complete and self-consistent. The canon it employs, the form of knowledge on which it insists, is, in one word, eifio?. Hence its natural affinity is for ab- stract sciences like Formal Logic and Formal Mathematics the sciences, be it remarked, that lay more immediately within the ken of the ancients. To an abstract-concrete science like Chemistry it likewise applies well enough, if all considerations pertaining to the concrete study of the chemi- cal problem be duly kept apart from that abstract aspect whereto the scope of the method properly confines it. In- organic Chemistry, for instance, save in so far as it deals with ' allotropic forms ' or what not, is able to put forward its definitory formulae as formulas with a brave show of absolute assurance. To Organic Chemistry, on the other hand, and more especially to that branch of it which is nowadays coming to be known as ' Biological Chemistry,' it is constantly being brought home by the hard logic of fact that the strictly chemical or abstract view is quite inadequate to a satisfactory comprehension of the problem as it appeals to the man of science lurking behind the pure chemist. Accordingly, when we have to do with an evo- lutionary science proper for instance, with a concrete science like Biology as opposed to an abstract-concrete science like Biological Chemistry the Method of Definition seems at first sight to break down altogether. A new method comes into prominence the Method of Discovery implying a view of the facts studied which primarily at any rate is dynamic. No science, however, that would truly be concrete, could afford to limit itself to a merely dynamic view. Nay, it is absolutely essential to Discovery as a logical