Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/79

THE METAPHYSICAL METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY. 67 stream, and not forwards in obedience to the dictum, operari scquititr csse, seeing that past experience offers us apparently equal facilities for tracing causes to their effects, as effects to their causes ? The answer is plain. In going from a given analysed thing to its cause or sum of conditions, I have a limit to the inquiry ; the analysis of the given thing tells me to some extent both what I want to know, and when I have got an answer to it. But if I go from that analysed thing to its effects, I have to collect ah 1 the other conditions into combination with which it may come, and according to which its effects will vary. A given analysed thing is a sui/i of effects, but it is only a bundle of conditions. Itfocusses the conditions on which it depends, it scatters the conditions on which its effects depend. To follow it in its effects, I must find out all its possible combinations, and distinguish the contribution of each of its component elements severally, in the results of each combination severally. This latter pro- cess is applicable in science, by means of actual experiment, for there we can vary the combinations and see by actual inspection how a given thing behaves in each of them ; but it is not applicable in philosophy, where we are engaged in examining a content of consciousness by thought, for there both the combinations and the resulting effects must be imagined by hypothesis, and we do not attain a knowledge of the effects of a given thing, until we know the effects of each of its elements of analysis in all its possible combina- tions. This process, which is evidently hopeless, would be synthesis, prediction by imagination. The only true syn- thesis is scientific, consisting first in constructing hypothesis, and then in putting the things actually together in experi- ments which test the hypothesis. I argue, therefore, that going backwards from effects to causes, so keeping strictly to analysis, is the only line practi- cally open to a subjective method, which keeps strictly to experience, and begins with the analysis of given things. The opposite course can lead only to substitute imaginary anticipations in the place of facts. And that it actually does so is shown by the history of philosophy ; for the deduction of the operation of things, taken as units, from their essence defined by genus and differentia, thus making them into causal agents, is the main idea which Scholasticism derived from Aristotle, and the application of which has brought philosophy to its present state of disintegration. It is to this synthetic or deductive method that I now oppose the method of backward-going analysis, a method which, I beg you to remark, covers the whole ground, just as much as the other. For, though we do not begin with looking for the