CHAPTER XVII.

METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL.

When modern philosophy took its first steps, it was disdainful and depreciatory to the past, both Medieval and Old-Greek. Bacon and Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza,--be their other differences what they may--all echo the same disparagement. Like Wordsworth's _Rob Roy_, they cry--

'What need of books? Burn all the statutes and their shelves.

We'll show that we can help to frame A world of other stuff.'

On this iconoclastic age supervenes the attempt of Leibniz to combine in one all that was good in the new corpuscular philosophy with all that was precious in the old Platonic idealism as expanded by Aristotle. So, at the later philosophic crisis towards the close of the eighteenth century, the somewhat destructive and revolutionary tendencies of Kant and Fichte lead up by a natural revulsion and complement to the reconstructive systems of Schelling and Hegel. In them the conservative instinct comes to supplement the defects of the radical go-ahead. Instead of tossing the past away to the winds, and crying out _Écrasez l'infâme_,--instead of throwing medievalism behind, breaking all the restrictions on individual liberty which feudal Europe had created to secure and safeguard the communities that housed its early freedom, the new spirit of the time saw that the problems of modern life were not solved by merely throwing overboard as encumbrances and refuse all checks and forms. On the contrary, the reflective mind saw that forms and checks so-called there must be, and that the art of statesmanship, though it could not entirely consist in copying the old, had still to work in some way after the analogy of the old methods: i. e. to do under new circumstances what would solve the same requisites, as the old constitution had done for its time. The change is well illustrated by the attitude towards state organisation shown by William von Humboldt at different epochs of his life.

People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and what it has done for us. To hear what is sometimes said it might be supposed that this was the method that had been always habitual in history, but which in these latter days had been applied to other topics, and had proved its value on the new ground by achieving results that had hitherto been mere desiderata. This however is pretty nearly to reverse the true state of the case. It was long till history came to have any method worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as great historians the object had been to tell a good tale, to keep the thread of events distinct, to subordinate incidents to the main issue, to portray personal and public character and its influence on events. History was practised--we may even say--more as an art than as a science. If it dealt with causes, it dealt with individual, concrete, living causes, not with cold, dead abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it did not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for principles to be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it was much more enamoured of the art of Livy and Tacitus, or even of the naïveté of Herodotus. Of such history who has not felt the power; who has not admired the genius that reconstructs the men and circumstances of the past, and makes them live over again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm to inevitable fate! But it was not from such history that the historical method arose.

The historical method was the product of the new conception of nature and mind in their mutual relations which has been already noted. To estimate the labours of thinkers towards this view of history would be an interesting but complex inquiry. Leibniz in particular by his principles of development, of continuity, of general analogy, should have made two things for ever clear. And these two results that might have been supposed secure were, first, that the present existence (which at first seems to be alone real) is only a narrow transition line between a past and a future,--a line of points intersecting a complex movement or development; and secondly, that all development is of something which is essentially infinite, which requires nothing external, no fillip from circumstances or from an external providence, to set it going, but is in itself a synthesis of active and passive force in a something at least analogous to an Ego. The first principle is embalmed in Leibniz's maxim: 'The present is laden with the past, and full of the future': and the second, in the maxim 'the Monads have no doors or windows.' In virtue of the first, the existent (of this instant) is only a stage or grade, rooted in what has been, and insignificant unless in reference to what is to come. In virtue of the second, all development is from within, and presupposes therefore that the developing individual includes within it a great deal which a cursory view would at first sight assume to be without it, and only accidentally in contact with it. It might indeed be well to add a third principle--what Leibniz has sometimes called the Law of Continuity--the law that, as he says, distinct and noticeable perceptions are the resultants of an infinite number of insensible or little perceptions. But continuity proper is not this: continuity proper or identity is a pure idea. The visible or sensible discontinuity reposes on, and is to be explained by, an invisible or ideal continuity. Each body, for instance, in nature, appearing to have a separate existence of its own, is only a stage isolated or insulated in a continuing process: and that process, binding, as it does, past to future, is the process of a Mind. _Omne Corpus_, wrote Leibniz in 1671, _est mens momentanea seu carens recordatione._ Every physical and material object is an intelligence, but an intelligence which neither looks before nor after, but is limited _for itself_ to the mere instant: an intelligence which has no history. Yet to the intelligent observer it has a past,--it has a memory, it bears in it the traces of its antecedent. Yet to read that book of memory, to decipher the 'insensible perceptions' which are buried beneath the momentary present, beneath its unspiritual reality, and to knit present with past and future, is the work of an intelligence, in and to whom the material discloses its store of meaning, or in whom it is re-spiritualised. In other words, the presupposition of this historical method is the ideal continuity of being, transcending and absorbing the differences of time.

But the teaching of Leibniz--even more perhaps than that of Spinoza--fell on an evil age: if it was not actually choked with thorns, it found a soil with little depth, and its brief verdure was soon followed by a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to commend his theories to all men,--and not least perhaps to win the suffrages of some illustrious and intelligent women--he was led to present them under forms and phrases which were to each correspondent specially familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent. The forms of accommodation were what told: they stuck, and the truth they were meant to convey slipped away: the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted into the doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with Spinoza, so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his meaning came first to the thinkers on the borderland of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and Herder, and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic systems first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all, this theory of 'petites perceptions' so closely bound up (as was to be expected) with his mathematical discoveries in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a finer ear for the secret harmonies and principles of existence than the coarser organs of popular philosophy could catch up or appreciate.

'In order,' says Leibniz, 'to get a clearer idea of the little perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the crowd, I am accustomed to employ the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes us upon the shore. To hear this sound, as we do hear it, we must hear the parts which compose this total, i. e. the sounds of each wave, though each of these little sounds only makes itself perceptible in the confused assemblage of all the others together, (that is to say, in that same roar,) and would not be noticed if this wave which causes it were alone. For we must be a little affected by the movement of that wave, and we must have some perception of each of these sounds, however small they may be; otherwise we should never have the perception of a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand zeros would never make anything.... These little perceptions are of greater efficiency by their consequences than we suppose. It is they which form that _Je ne sais quoi_, those tastes, those images of sensible qualities, clear in the assemblage, but confused in the parts; those impressions made upon us by surrounding bodies which envelop the infinite, that _nexus_ which each being has with all the rest of the universe. It may even be said that in virtue of these little perceptions the present is big with the future and laden with the past, that everything conspires together: and that in the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole sequel of the things of the universe.

'These insensible perceptions, further, mark and constitute the same individual, who is characterised by the traces or expressions which they preserve of the preceding states of that individual, thus forming the connexion with his present state. These may be known by a superior spirit, though that individual himself should not feel them, i. e. though express memory should no longer be there. But these perceptions also supply the means of rediscovering that memory, at need, by periodic developments, which may one day happen.... It is also by these insensible perceptions that I explain that admirable pre-established harmony of mind and body, and even of all monads or simple substances,--which takes the place of the impossible influence of one upon another.... After this, I should add but little if I said that it is these small perceptions which _determine_ us in many conjunctures without our thinking of it, and which deceive the vulgar by the appearance of an _indifference of equilibrium_, as if we were entirely indifferent whether we turned, e. g., to right or to left.

'I have remarked also that in virtue of insensible variations two individual things could never be perfectly alike, and that they ought always to differ more than _numero._ And with this we have done once for all with the empty tablets of the mind, a soul without thought, a substance without action, the void of space, the atoms, and even parcels not actually divided in matter; we have done with pure repose, entire uniformity in a portion of time, of place or of matter,... and a thousand other fictions of philosophers which come from their incomplete notions, fictions which the nature of things does not suffer, and which our ignorance and the little attention we have for the insensible lets pass, but which could never be rendered tolerable, unless we confine them to abstractions of the mind which protests that it does not deny what it puts aside and considers out of place in any present consideration. Otherwise, if we took it quite in earnest, to mean that things which we do not perceive do not exist in the soul or body, we should fail in philosophy as in politics by neglecting τὀ μικρόν, insensible steps of progress:--whereas an abstraction is not an error provided we know that what we put out of sight is still there.'

This was the conception which Bacon had shadowed out, which Leibniz had presented under many names and with many applications, as the olive-branch between Plato and Democritus; it now became through philosophical and extra-philosophic acceptance a current maxim in the general field of knowledge. Nature assimilated to history, and history assimilated to nature: freedom built upon necessity, and efficient causes rounded off, though not entirely merged, in final. It is the recognition of law, order, causality in the psychical world, yet not of _mere_ so-called natural law; and therefore without reducing it to a merely physical and material world. It is in fact the new method which is inevitable and necessary, as soon as it is manifest that life, organisation, development is the underlying truth and central notion of things. You look at the world at first, let us say, as a mere collection of separate things in varying degrees of juxtaposition: and all that you think of doing to them, either by way of theory or practice, is to put them together, to link them closer, or separate them more widely. You do so from outside by an arranging force; for they are assumed to be purely passive, waiting to be touched, each set in its place--from which it can only be moved by a push or a pull. This is the method of mathematics or mechanics. It shows the dexterity of the agent or of the expositor: but you feel that it is artificial, and arbitrary. It is analytic or synthetic--but not auto-analysis or auto-synthesis. The director of the movement (we may call it 'construction') may no doubt have the real secret: he may work the things well and fairly, and unite or divide them according to inner affinities; but we cannot, as matters stand, be sure of this. The things, in fact, he deals with have been already emptied of all life and peculiarity of their own: they are alike in quality, only differing by a more or less,--a difference which at any moment may be altered by an act of subtraction or addition. No doubt you can build up what are _called_ systems--compounds of a kind--in this way: but they do not really hang and grow together; they are only prevented from breaking up by the absence of any empty place to which the parts may withdraw. Bit holds up bit; but how all the bits have found themselves so caged up without exit is a mystery. Absolute neutrality or indifference of each part to others, and yet absolute equilibrium[1] in the total composite,--such is the situation.

The chemical method (taking chemistry as a type of the sciences like optics, electricity, &c.) is a revelation of a different state of affairs. The elements of things are here seen to be unique and incomparable; yet in each there is a latent sympathy ready to break out when the proper occasion arrives. Bring two things together, and their affinity suddenly, in the proper circumstances, leads to their complete fusion: a product arises which, when formed, hardly betrays its origin and composition. In a way this is the converse of the mechanical or mathematical method. In it was no fusion, no inner mixture: each part after composition lay beside the other, and their union was only in the ideas of the onlooker. It was mere juxtaposition still,--though now closer: an abnormally keen eye would still have been able to descry the dividing lines and measure the gaps. At least mere mechanical physics tends so to conceive it. Here, on the contrary, there is union--but only at the moment of fusion: once that is accomplished, the result is apparently simple, and bears no suggestion of being a compound. In the mechanical union the result is exactly equal to the sum of the elements which go to make it: in the chemical there is something positively new, something, i. e., of which the premises gave no indication and made no promise.

Either of these methods,--of these conceptions of existence--works well in a certain region. But both of them only do their work on a certain hypothesis, or with a certain abstraction. The mechanical method supposes that objects are all qualitatively alike, differing only in quantity or weight: all therefore entirely comparable with each other, and capable of being substituted for each other in an equation. Where this assumption holds good, the method of addition and division, the method of the calculus does its work[2]. The chemical method works on another assumption,--the assumption of a number of qualitatively-differenced elements, of elements which also are, so to speak, set on edge against some, and ready to leap into the arms of others. If the observer in the first case had the game entirely in his own hand,--could build up and separate at his pleasure, could determine results _a priori_: he is here baffled by the unexpected, and can only wait and watch to learn _a posteriori_ the behaviour of the bodies possessed of this occult and non-predictable affinity. At the best he can only formulate what he observes, try to classify it, ascertain any common principles running through it, any serial recurrences, or the like: and that is all that chemical philosophy can achieve. Chemical affinity--the fact that certain elements combine in certain ways, and refuse to enter into certain alliances--is a great fact: but to _a priori_ reasoning or abstract syllogising it is an entire inexplicability, one of the accidents in the universe which must be reckoned with, but cannot be understood.

It is probably evident that, if we want to get a comprehension of the life and concrete reality of things, neither of these methods will quite answer the purpose. With the first alone, if it could be universally carried out, the universe would be thoroughly explained: everything would be exactly equivalent to some sum or multiple of every other: there would be no mystery, nothing unique, and strictly individual. Given time, we could find a formula for every reality, and a predicate exactly fitted to any subject. Yet even mathematics has to confess the existence of irrationals, surds, infinite series, and the like. For our unities and standards are always arbitrary, artificial, and one-sided, and fall short of the subtlety of nature. Even our simpler types of surfaces--the circle and the square--remain irreducible to each other: and we only avoid the collision by the remark that practically and with any required amount of exactness the discrepancy between the two can be adjusted. If we turn to the chemical method, again, there is a nearer approach to actuality in the recognition of the presence of something more than mere composition and juxtaposition. It is not that there is something which is _not_ juxtaposition: but rather it is much _more than mere_ juxtaposition. There may be degrees of this something more: but it is only to a gross or abstract view that it is not present at all. Mere cohesion even shows a unity in things juxta-posed. Mere contact is contagious: it infects. 'When a violin has been played on frequently by a tyro,' says G. H. Lewes, 'its tone deteriorates, its molecules become re-arranged, so that one mode of vibration is more ready than another[3].' 'Toute impression,' he quotes from Delboeuf, 'laisse une certaine trace ineffaçable.' So-called chemical composition is only a conspicuous instance, with peculiarities, of this alteration in state produced by what, from the mechanical standpoint, are called inner molecular displacements. But to recognise a fact is one thing: to give its explanation is another. Yet, on the other hand, to recognise the fact is to note an important point which had been omitted by the mechanical construction of things. There the result could hardly be called new: it was exactly equal to its constituent elements: and the equation was transparent. And it was transparent because the whole process, analysis and synthesis, was not a work or process of the observed thing, but the work of the observing mind: it makes the (artificial) unities, numbers them, and adds them or subtracts. But with the chemical result, though it also is equal to its elements, there is something new. Water, no doubt, is oxygen and hydrogen, but here, at least, there is no doubt that the _plus_ sign unduly simplifies the relationship, and rather indicates or represents a nexus than accurately defines it. And yet, there is nothing in water which was not, in some--shall we say mysterious?--way, in the oxygen and the hydrogen. Chemical physics, therefore, brings out clearly, or comparatively clearly, something which the ordinary and coarser simplicity-loving theory is obliged and is able to neglect: it realises the virtue that lies in juxtaposition, and shows that the mere outer change of quantity goes with a deeper inward and qualitative one. The result does more than sum up and condense what was spread out in extension and dispersed in parts before: it brings out or reveals something which previously was unsurmised. Always, in a liberal interpretation of the maxim, it is true that _Ex nihilo nihil fit:_ but here, especially, the effect actually discloses what was--but was latent or unperceived--in the premises. The maxim, to be fairly treated, must be read backwards as well as forwards.

But we must go a step further if we wish the full explanation. If the premises are to be adequate to support the conclusion, they must be restated in terms which hint at the conclusion--which in a way contain it, but contain it in potentiality and promise, not in act. This is the method of development, which is the method that is applicable to full concrete reality, not like the others to parts abstracted from or insulated in reality. So long as you deal with these selected bits of fact--abstracted from their surroundings, subject to strict observation or strict experiment, you can apply a comparatively simple and straightforward method. You are dealing with abstracted, mutilated, prepared fact. You are guided in these cases by the canons of identity and difference: you add and subtract, or subtract and add; and that is all. You use what are called the rules of experimental method. But these canons do not directly apply--except by happy accident--to the real world, where antecedent and consequents are not separate and tabulated, as the logical canons, the rules of formal logic, require. In dealing with this concrete reality, a much more complex method is needed, a method which has to blend induction with deduction, and to start from both ends in the series of causation at once. You can apply observation or experiment, only when the issues have already been extremely simplified and narrowed down: when the question has been rendered so definite that it is next-door to the answer, and the removal of a slight partition-wall will as it were make the two one clear space. Where observation and experiment are available, indeed, is where the general outlines and principles of the subject are settled, where the scheme of reality is defined in large, but a variety of minor issues still remains to be settled. Unless this general framework is fixed, neither observation nor experiment, with their canon of identity and difference, are of any avail. These methods, therefore, only apply in sciences which are in principle or substantially complete, though admitting of possibly infinite extension in details and particulars. Where the science is yet to constitute, i. e. in dealing with the kinds of real things in their completeness, and not as viewed in some definite aspect, induction and deduction must go hand in hand and help each other at every step: and if they, as they must, have recourse to experiment and observation, it will be at first in a very unsatisfactory and tentative way.

Such is the way the contrast between the simplicity belonging to an artificial method dealing with picked instances, and the complexity that real concrete organic nature demands, presented itself to J. S. Mill as he advanced in his inquiry. The only complete method for the investigation of unsophisticated nature, not yet mapped out and defined in general departments, is the deductive-inductive method in which induction and deduction separately have a subordinate place,--using induction in the narrow sense the term has been hitherto allowed to bear. And that sense, it may be added, is, as in some passages of Aristotle, little else than a reverse of syllogism, or to speak more accurately, it is a syllogism which goes up to generals instead of descending from them. It is like the syllogistic deduction formal and abstract in character. The (deductive) syllogism assumes the existence of major premises--of general propositions which in the last resort, if they are real bases, must be primary and true, or self-evident facts. But a critic, like Mill, had little difficulty in showing that a general truth rests upon and presupposes the very particular conclusions which it is used to establish. Unless every singular is true, the universal which embraces or unifies them cannot really be true. Therefore the conclusion is really implied and presupposed in the principles of its premises. But, unfortunately for the application and supposed sequel of this not unjust remark, a similar remark may be made on the ordinary exposition of the inductive method. Induction, it is said, infers from or on a basis of single facts. But if a single truth is really, i. e. unconditionally true, it is indistinguishable from the universal. If it is really true once, it is true for ever. The assertion of the individual proposition as true, if it can be supported--(and unless it be true, what basis can it afford for the general conclusion?)--implies the truth of the universal it is sometimes used to establish. The inductive logician tells us to build on singular and definite facts, on truths of definite and individual experience: but a definite or determinate truth rests upon universality (indeed is a universal), and cannot be found unless we have already found the special total or organism of truth in which it forms a part. Individuals and universals presuppose each other, and do not, as the first impression leads us to think, stand apart as two unconnected termini, from either of which, if we happen to be so located, we can without road or railway make a legitimate passage to the other.

If it be urged, as it may naturally be, that on this showing there is no solid or 'absolute' starting-point at all, the contention may be conceded. The only fixed and steady points in knowledge are points hypothetically fixed,--certified, that is, for the time and in the circumstances we employ them. But in the open field--or rather in the wilderness--of knowledge, where the ground of fact is not staked off, and the unexpected may always turn up, the only test of truth is the corroboration given by the consilience of paths initiated from different points: it is only by an undesigned coincidence in the results of independent operations that you can succeed in orienting yourself. You begin your road at two ends, and you meet: you locate or fix your point by drawing its co-ordinates to two direction-lines taken anyhow at first, and only in formed science diverging at a fixed angle. And in the absolute your direction-lines cannot be supposed fixed: you can only gradually adjust them to each other as you proceed. Intelligence, says Aristotle, is a principle, a beginning; and intelligence, he says again, supplies beginnings[4]. Science, in the technical sense, only comes into operation,--or, in other words, deduction and (in the narrower sense used by Mill, and proceeding by _pure_ observation and experiment) induction only find a way,--where beginnings and principles have been set up, where an approximate order or provisional system has been established. And if logic, in its stricter sense, is the method of sciences already made and in their essentials constituted, then logic can be asked to do no more than to provide a theory of such formal processes. If it traces the path which leads 'from the known to the unknown,' if it always proceeds on the hypothesis of a given knowledge, then such induction or deduction (from certain and approved singular facts, or from certain and approved general truths) fully satisfies the practical need of the scientific reasoner. But if Logic be, as it sometimes is, and may very reasonably be, taken in the wider sense of an epistemology,--a theory of the nature and origin of knowledge as a whole, and not of mere inference or syllogism;--if it does not merely ask how we can satisfactorily get from one piece of knowledge (we are supposed to have) to another (not yet supposed to be), but how we come to have knowledge at all; then its problem must go behind the rudiments of vulgar induction and deduction. It must ask--what, so far as one can see, Mill and his mere followers have never seriously asked at all--what induction is, what are its relations with deduction, and what is the place of either in the process of knowledge. And as the process of knowledge is the path to reality, it must also ask about the nature of this goal,--reality and truth. It is all very well for the narrower Logic to formulate in terms the methods actually employed in sciences: to state in abstract canons what is there seen in life and action. But a _Science of Logic_--an epistemology--(and a genuine epistemology cannot claim to be anything short of an ontology) must face the fact of science itself--must ask how the ideas of the knower must--or otherwise they are not knowledge--embrace and contain the reality of the known. The other and narrower Logic is and will remain a theory of forms of reasoning-a transcript in fainter terms of the procedure of science in any given step it takes upward to generals or downward to particulars: but the logic which deals with knowledge as such, in its systematic entirety,--the transcendental Logic, in short, must have a real value, an invincible relation to reality. The formal Logic--the logic of Mill and Hamilton--must be carried back to its principles, to its first step: and that first step which will also be the last step, and the inspiring principle of every intermediate step, is that of Intelligence (Aristotle's Νοῡς), of which the products or manifestations are λόγοι, i. e. definite conceptions, categories, formulations of rules and principles of definite range,--determinations or special types of unity.

Mill really faced the problem of method to better effect when he came to deal with a class of questions in which he was really interested, and which moreover have for epistemological purposes the advantage of being as yet unreduced into the rank and file of disciplined science. These questions are those dealing with man, his mental and moral nature, and history. Even its advocates or patrons occasionally admit that there is no accepted idea of what Sociology is or does. Its name at least expresses a longing towards a unity, or a presentiment that there is some underlying unity and common method in the group of what are loosely called the moral, or the historical, or the social and political sciences. But sociology is, as most people will allow, the name of a science unrealised--the felt and consciously-apprehended need of a science, and the dissatisfaction with the existing state of knowledge in certain departments. And undoubtedly it was with problems of social science,--problems of politico-economic and socio-ethical or socio-religious matters, that Mill's interests were mainly engaged. Like his master in this department, Auguste Comte, he wanted to carry into the topics which he was chiefly bent upon that 'scientific' precision which they by pretty general admission lacked, and which revolutionary movements had shown they greatly needed. But he could not help seeing that the 'induction' of dynamics and physics was not exactly the instrument he was in search of. Theory and hypothesis here demanded a much larger share in the process than in the more mathematical sciences. Causes and effects in reality here rolled round into each other, instead of remaining calmly fixed, one set here, and the other there. Of course even here--i. e. in organic and concrete sciences--it is possible to introduce observation and experiment,--no doubt, with greater effort and constraint, but still not altogether impracticable. But the artificial and mutilative character of such experimentation is felt here in a way different from its pressure in other cases. And what is more important, to institute an experiment or set on foot a scientific observation (and to observe means to _watch_ a definitely restricted natural process with a view to answer some question about it), presupposes--as we have already seen--a tolerably definite provisional theory as to the general lie of the country to be investigated. Only when the country has been reasonably well mapped out in provinces and provided with some system of roads, can these problems of detail--questions to be answered Yes or No--be profitably put. And it is--in some parts of the historical sciences at least--somewhat premature to put questions requiring a categorical reply. There is only the vague _malaise_ of felt difficulty to guide us. We do not, in many cases, know what it is that we want to know; for, it demands a good deal of wisdom and trained art to put the proper or reasonable question,--so much so, indeed, that to succeed in formulating your question fully is equivalent or nearly equivalent to being able to answer it. The value of observations and experiments--which are ways of putting nature to the question and it may be to the torture--depends entirely upon the knowledge and the command of general ideas possessed by the observer and experimenter. And the same may be said of the reduced and tabulated conspectuses of the results of many observations and experiments which are called Statistics. Their value depends on the truth and breadth of view which presided at their collection and arrangement[5].

The historical or genetic method is the method of Science in general, but considered and employed under a limited aspect. And under its more comprehensive aspect it may be called--though no name is unimpeachable--the method of development. Now the essence of the idea of development--as was clearly shown by Leibniz--is the refusal to admit external interference, and the resolve to let a thing explain itself by itself. It does not, like the mechanical method, manipulate the thing from outside--try to add it up out of factors or items fashioned and fabricated after some external standard. Nor does it, like the chemical, look at the result as an inexplicable alteration, due apparently to a mere stroke of combination or disintegration--yet not obviously reducible to a mere equivalent of its elements. On the contrary, it recognises in the object a certain independence or originality, yet also the presence of an immanent law which does not wait for the outsider to put it together, but constructs itself, as it were, after a plan of its own. There is in the so-called object, though we do not at first sight recognise it, the same originative principle both analytic and synthetic, as we own in thought. The object is--in a true logic--a process, a self-completing process, and not merely an object, mechanical, or other object. It changes, grows or decays, while we observe, unless for brief instants we cut it off from its connexions and arrest its development. And our observation, if truly scientific, must be sympathetic with its process of change. It is neither a mere thing to be explained and construed _ab extra_: nor a mystery of sudden transformation to be passively accepted; but a growth, a history, to be sympathetically watched and understood,--understood, because it follows the same order as the movement of our own thought in the process of knowledge. _Similia similibus cognoscuntur_[6].

One sometimes hears it asked by paradoxical critics at which end a history should begin. And to ordinary dogmatic recklessness, paradoxical the question may well seem. Begin at the beginning, no doubt, is the vulgar reply; which in this case is understood to mean from the earliest point in date (that, of course, being easily ascertained, and a thing known to all men). But,--so Plato long ago well raised the difficulty which will always confront us,--are we to go from the beginnings, or towards the beginnings? And it does not quite solve the question to say that we are to begin with what is known: for under that word the same difficulty re-appears. Can you really know one end without the other? To the vulgar partisan of historical method, its precept means Go to the earlier, if you wish to understand the meaning, the value, and the elements constitutive of the later and subsequent. Begin with origins, with the earliest elements, the phases that first appear; and thus you will get light to see the later as they really stand. That this is a common interpretation of the historical method is notorious. To explain _Homo sapiens_, one is told to study the ape,--the nearest analogue of his lost or missing progenitor: to understand the contemporary horse, go to eohippus, or hipparion, or however his early prototype may be at present named and recognised. And in all this there is a truth--or least a half-truth. But let us equally recognise the other half of the truth. If past throws light on present, present throws not less light on past. You propose, let us say, to write a history of Greece. A wordy philosophy, wise in its own conceit and in fine phrases, will advise you to approach the subject without prepossession or prejudice. So far, good. But what is meant by the absence of prepossession or prejudice? Not a blank openness to impression, not a mere passivity; but if passivity at all, a wise passivity: if openness, the openness of the trained judge.

The advice, so often associated with Francis Bacon, to get rid of all false pre-conceptions, of all _idola,_ is one which it is easy to mistake in an over-zeal to follow it. That mere negation of prejudices which we call childish innocence is no match for the craft by which Nature seeks to keep or disguise her secrets. The free consciousness, the unbiassed mind, is not the easy result of one great act of renunciation, but the work of continued self-discipline, self-conquest, self-realisation. If you are not to impose upon the thing a pre-conception alien to it, neither must you rashly give yourself away to the thing, or to the first whims which accident puts upon you as the thing. What seems a fact or thing is only a candidate for the post of thing or fact: and its credentials need to be examined, and compared with other evidences. To detect a fact, therefore, is only possible for a tried and tested consciousness which by patience and self-mastery has won the key of interpretation. What Bacon apparently meant--though, as often happens, in his eagerness to combat a prevailing folly, he sometimes overshot himself in statement--was to insist on the eternal wedlock of the mind and things, of things and the mind, as the sole and sufficient condition for the reality of knowledge and truth. The mind may not presume to do without things, or things to domineer the mind;--or the result is a windy and frothy vanity. And the wedlock is eternal: in his own eloquent words, 'the mind itself is but an accident to knowledge[7],' and he might have added, so also are things: for, as he says, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one': only in the bond of knowledge are things true and real,--being otherwise only 'permanent possibilities,' or possibilities barely even permanent--or not even possibilities. Yet he scarcely realised that his 'due rejections and exclusions' and negations were a fundamental _constitutive_ element in those facts of which he habitually emphasises only the positive side.

He therefore who would understand--or would write--the history of Greece must really in his studies begin at both ends--both at the Greece of to-day, and at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period may be taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the least qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will begin with the Greece of to-day; or if he deals solely with Ancient Greece he will begin with the full blaze of Hellenic civilisation which still has a pale reflection in the modern world, and gradually work back to the beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek history, say, with the Homeric Age, and work downwards, as it is customary to begin a formal treatise on geography with the general features of the earth's shape and surface. But that beginning represents really the temporarily accredited and accepted result of a process which, starting from the other end, has worked backwards to commencements or origins. And the teacher, in particular, will do well not to imitate too slavishly the method of the formal treatise. A day may come--or may have come--for example, for Greek history to start from periods long anterior to the supposed or traditional date of the wars around the wall of Troy. But when it does so, it will have done so by more thoroughly ransacking the Greece of to-day: and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern diggings on Greek soil reveal the features of an earlier than what was erewhile to older historians its earliest past, the reconstruction of that early people's life reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations of its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the reality of Homer, and even of Demosthenes--into their ideal glory and their historical limitations, when we explore the cradle in which their race's life was erst fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature hewed them. And this is no peculiarity of Greece. The deepest research into the social institutions which control the England of to-day is the best propaedeutic for the study of Anglo-Saxon times; and the same is true _vice versa_.

Nor, again, is the truth of the proposition confined to what we ordinarily mean by history. The Greek poet has said 'Art had to wait on and welcome chance, and chance to wait on Art': or as we may paraphrase it, if every invention and discovery is in a measure a lucky chance, it is a luck that only falls to the wisely prepared head and hand. The casual event falls as a germ of new construction or theory only on an intelligence ready to welcome it,--prepared with its complement in the spirit of an idea, eager to take shape. The means again, in the arts and crafts, is not only a means to something else; it is also a means to its own end, to realise or perfect itself. The rude tool of the savage, for instance, is not merely a means to supply his wants: it is also a means towards completing and improving itself, and towards perfecting itself by constructing an ampler tool, which supersedes it, because it can do all and more than all the work of the earlier, or can do it more economically. All progress that deserves the name is an incessant and continuous revision of a first step: a re-adaptation of an old instrument: a repeated and unending self-correction. It is only a partially-true symbol of human advance to speak of it as a line: unless we add, by another piece of symbolism, that the line is only the protracted or extended phase in which the form of time drags out for us the magnified and organised point-nucleus. It is a truth--which we are only too ready to forget or discount--that the savage (and he bears with justice both epithets, 'the noble savage,' and 'the brute barbarian') is not something left happily behind us, in the onward march of civilisation; but that he is, however much we may fancy him suppressed and superseded, still present, at least 'ideally' in the finest products of humanity, and may hap only too likely--as the Russian is said, when scratched, to betray his original Tartar breed--to burst put on provocation into a grim reality. The Pullman car of to-day retains within it for the archaeologically-trained eye the rudiments of the primitive wain of the primitive nomade: and the careful study of either end of the scale will not merely throw a marvellous light on the excellencies or the defects of the other, but will probably also tend in the impartial observer to moderate the self-gratulations of modern advance. For it is only those whose view ranges within narrow limits that are over-impressed by the magnitude of the advance made in the 'last new thing.'

If progress were but the addition of bit to bit, of new bits to what is already there, or if we could change _this,_ and leave _that_ unchanged,--as the word perhaps verbally means, and as many people at any rate seem to understand it, progress might indeed seem an easy thing, and to be undertaken with a light heart. For, it would appear as if we could lose nothing, and might probably (indeed, as enthusiasm and forgetfulness of the merits of the past are in certain periods ready to urge, must certainly) gain. But it is a more serious matter when we realise that we must move altogether, if we really are to move at all; i. e. really are to make progress, and not merely change, so to speak, from one foot to rest on another. For progress,--if it be what it is expected to be, and what it must be if it does what it is expected to do--is an organic, and not merely a mechanical or chemical change. A mechanical change is only a nominal or formal change: a chemical is more than change; but in organic change, that which changes also abides, and the new is not merely other than the old, and not merely a re-arrangement of the old, but the old transmuted,--the same yet not the _mere_ same[8]. Progress in short is always the unity of differentiation and integration. It must not be an externality, nor a mere dead product of a transformation scene, but a continuous growth, inwardly digested, made part and parcel of the collective life, which it has thereby rendered more full, real, and not merely made less intense at the cost of some extension. In true progress, which is only another name for true growth, nothing is quite lost, but only changed, retained in a richer shape and a fuller reality. How far such progress is possible, except in limited and finite spheres: how far progress in one involves necessarily deterioration in another and how, therefore, progress is not attributable to the Absolute, are questions we need not here discuss. But so far at least we may go as to say that a progress which does not follow the natural law of development and carry on into the future the worth and substance of the past, is not a progress which any general enthusiasm ought to be spent upon.

Development then has two faces, one to the future and another to the past. And what is called the historical method is apt to emphasise only one of the two aspects, just as, it may be added, practical considerations are often likely to produce an opposite but equally partial bias in favour of the future. The historical method in incapable hands is liable to lead to unprofitable sighs,--not unaccompanied by a certain luxury of tears--over the lowly hole of the pit--it may even be the filth and brutishness, out of which so much of noble humanity (for thither the interest of development always reverts) has been dug; and in empty heads the practical, the vulgarly-utilitarian satisfaction is liable to equally vain fits of self-applause on our magnificent progress. But both the self-depreciation of him who loiters regretfully round the beggarly rudiments, and the self-laudation of glorious 'improvements' looking derisively on less glorious days, are unworthy of the reasonable and scientific spirit. The philosophical method does not allow itself to be imposed upon by the lapse of time, and insists that in a sense the past contained the present--that, as the poet says, the child is father of the man. Not indeed contained in any grosser or more delicate mechanical way. The coming development does not necessarily lie prefigured--if we had the proper microscope to see it--as a germ in the first and original state. That may be, or may not be. Yet prefigured it is by the law of its structure, or in the intelligible unity by which only can its existence be understood and construed.

But if this be the method of real development, in the growth of nature, and the progress of history, it is also the method of that supreme product of historical progress, the spirit and system of philosophy. Thought, also, the culminating stage in which the spirit of man becomes conscious of itself and of its universe, will move or grow on the same lines as that of which it is the comprehension and theory. It will begin at the two ends, and each beginning will complete and presuppose the other. Nature will suppose and yet lead up to Spirit or Mind: Spirit or Mind will throw light on the mystery of Nature: Being will point to knowledge or Idea; and Idea show itself the basis of Being. Or, if we consider the triple division of the philosophic system, as it runs in Hegel's _Encyclopaedia_, we can see how misleading it may be to take that one order as absolute. To understand it thoroughly we must begin with each of the three in turn: so as thus to realise that each does not except figuratively succeed the other, but that in each an aspect of the whole truth is presented which had been put by the other parts somewhat in the background. In each part there is a definition and a revelation of the Absolute. But each is also, as it were, a projection, a perspective view, a condensed or expanded image of the other. In each the Absolute is one and whole, in some more veiled, more restricted, and more meagre than in others; but the veil, and the restriction, and the emptying, are self-imposed: and for that reason the veil is really transparent, the restriction is negatived, and the emptying is not only a self-humiliating but a self-ennobling irony--the irony of the Absolute.

[Footnote 1: Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to mean a great deal more than this,--how much will depend on the context. These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination: their apparent simplicity imposes upon us.]

[Footnote 2: The distinction, it will be observed, lies between the method of mathematical physics and that of physics which has learned something from the researches of electricity or chemistry. If the method or principles of chemistry are thus said to be reduced to those of physics, this is because the conceptions of physics have been revolutionised from the side of chemistry, &c., and even of biology. This tendency of modern science is precisely in the line indicated by Schelling and Hegel.]

[Footnote 3: _Problems of Life and Mind_, iii. p. 58.]

[Footnote 4: _Eth._ vii. 7 ὁ νοῡς ἀρχή: 6. 6 νοῡς ἐστι τῶν ἀρχῶν.]

[Footnote 5: Statistics only define--and primarily for the imagination--the general laws and principles on which they rest. The clear-cut mathematical form strikes and 'catches on,' where a more universal statement sounds vague and glides off. Hence, as one says, they may prove _anything._ The fact is, they prove _nothing._ They only illustrate in diagrammatic form the theory which presided at their collection. To emphasise the fundamental nature of ethics for human development you need only say that conduct is three-fourths or (as to some minds the precision rises with the denominator of the fraction 17/20) of human life.]

[Footnote 6: The resolute misinterpretation--as it often seems--of the maxim that like is known by like,--is a curious chapter in the history of Logic. All knowledge is based upon,--or, to speak more simply, _is_--the identity of differents: of differents, which in knowledge are identified,--of identity which in knowledge is put under difference. And yet the ordinary meaningless talk on this matter seems to assimilate knower and known to two separate things (or persons), who casually and, we may add, inexplicably know each other: which is mythology, perhaps, but not epistemology.]

[Footnote 7: Bacon: 'In Praise of Knowledge' (a mere leaflet of much significance towards estimating his true grandeur). On the _Conjugium_ of _Mens_ and _Universus_ see _Novum Organum_, distrib. op.]

[Footnote 8: The said _mere_ same is not really the same at all. Nobody in his senses predicates sameness except where he also sees differences: or, the term always implies relation.]