method of philosophy are identical. John Stuart Mill says that "the most scientific proceeding can be no more than an improved form of that which was primitively pursued by the human understanding while undirected by science. When mankind first formed the idea of studying phenomena according to a stricter and surer method than that which they had in the first instance spontaneously adopted, they did not, conformably to the well-meant, but impracticable precept of Descartes, set out from the supposition that nothing had been ascertained."[1] No, and Descartes' method was impracticable in science for the same reason that we have found it so in philosophy: because we cannot put our beliefs on a basis of philosophic certainty; because the world we live in is fitted to the needs of practical men and women, but not to the purposes of a philosopher who seeks to give to his system evidence differing in kind from that to which the practical man appeals in justification of his beliefs. If philosophic certainty were possible, the way to get it would surely be to follow the path that Descartes marked out; start from absolute certainties and make all your deductions from them by means of an absolutely certain principle. But if such certainty is not possible, then philosophy can only imitate the humble example of science: use the method of common sense, only in a more pains-taking, careful, accurate way. Francis Ellingwood Abott says: "While science adopted a purely empirical, objective method, took Nature for granted, investigated things and their relations by observation and experiment on the hypothesis of their equal objectivity, and entered on a career of dazzling conquest, without troubling itself to invent any philosophical justification for a method so prolific of discoveries as to silence all criticism or cavil by the brilliancy of its achievements, philosophy had already entered upon a path which led, indeed, to the construction of numerous subjective systems of unsurpassed ability, yet to none that could endure. . . . While science can proudly point to a vast store of verified and established truths, which it is a liberal education to have learned, and
- ↑ Logic, 8th ed., p. 231
