By the practice of methodological doubt, if it is genuine and prolonged, a certain humility as to our knowledge is induced: we become glad to know _anything_ in philosophy, however seemingly trivial. Philosophy has suffered from the lack of this kind of modesty. It has made the mistake of attacking the interesting problems at once, instead of proceeding patiently and slowly, accumulating whatever solid knowledge was obtainable, and trusting the great problems to the future. Men of science are not ashamed of what is intrinsically trivial, if its consequences are likely to be important; the _immediate_ outcome of an experiment is hardly ever interesting on its own account. So in philosophy, it is often desirable to expend time and care on matters which, judged alone, might seem frivolous, for it is often only through the consideration of such matters that the greater problems can be approached. When our problem has been selected, and the necessary mental discipline has been acquired, the method to be pursued is fairly uniform. The big problems which provoke philosophical inquiry are found, on examination, to be complex, and to depend upon a number of component problems, usually more abstract than those of which they are the components. It will generally be found that all our initial data, all the facts that we seem to know to begin with, suffer from vagueness, confusion, and complexity. Current philosophical ideas share these defects; it is therefore necessary to create an apparatus of precise conceptions as general and as free from complexity as possible, before the data can be analysed into the kind of premisses which philosophy aims at discovering. In this process of analysis, the source of difficulty is tracked further and further back, growing at each stage more abstract, more refined, more difficult to apprehend. Usually it will be found that a number of these extraordinarily abstract questions underlie any one of the big obvious problems. When everything has been done that can be done by method, a stage is reached where only direct philosophic vision can carry matters further. Here only genius will avail. What is wanted, as a rule, is some new effort of logical imagination, some glimpse of a possibility never conceived before, and then the direct perception that this possibility is realised in the case in question. Failure to think of the right possibility leaves insoluble difficulties, balanced arguments pro and con, utter bewilderment and despair. But the right possibility, as a rule, when once conceived, justifies itself swiftly by its astonishing power of absorbing apparently conflicting facts. From this point onward, the work of the philosopher is synthetic and comparatively easy; it is in the very last stage of the analysis that the real difficulty consists.