memorandum or formula of registration. So is it possible "to have the
enginer hoist with his own petar." But the conditions are not realized,
and in an experiential subject-matter are not realizable. Not one
circumstance only in common but "apparently one relevant circumstance
only in common" is what we are able to assert. If we add the
qualification of relevance we destroy the cogency of the method. If we
fail to add it, we destroy the applicability.
The objections turn on two main issues. One is the exaggeration of the
possibilities of resolution into separate elements that is due to the
acceptance of the postulate of an alphabet of nature. This so soon as
noted can be allowed for. It is to the combination of this doctrine
with a tendency to think chiefly of experiment, of the controlled
addition or subtraction of these elements one at a time, that we owe the
theoretically premature linking of a as effect to _A_ as cause. This too
can be met by a modification of form. The other issue is perhaps of more
significance. It is the oscillation which Mill manifests between the
conception of his formula as it is actually applicable to concrete
problems in practice, and the conception of it as an expression of a
theoretical limit to practical procedure. Mill seems most often to think
of the former, while tending to formulate in terms of the latter. At any
rate, if relevance _in proximo_ is interpolated in the peccant clause of
the canon of the Joint-Method, the practical utility of the method is
rehabilitated. So too, if the canon of the Method of Agreement is never
more than approximately satisfied, intermixture of effects will in
practice mean that we at least often do not know the cause or antecedent
equivalent of a given effect, without the possibility of an alternative.
Finally, it is on the whole in keeping with Mill's presuppositions to
admit even in the case of the method of difference that in practice it
is approximative and instructive, while the theoretical formula, to
which it aims at approaching asymptotically as limit, if exact, is in
some sense sterile. Mill may well have himself conceived his methods as
practically fruitful and normally convincing with the limiting formula
in each case more cogent in form but therewith merely the skeleton of
the process that but now pulsed with life.
Enough has been said to show why the advance beyond the letter of Mill
was inevitable while much in the spirit of Mill must necessarily affect
deeply all later experientialism. After Mill experientialism takes
essentially new forms. In part because of what Mill had done. In part
also because of what he had left undone. After Mill means after Kant and
Hegel and Herbart, and it means after the emergence of evolutionary
naturalism. Mill, then, marks the final stage in the achievement of a
great school of thought.
ii. _The Logic of Rationalism._
Spinoza.
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