Front matter (continued 4)
Reading edition
Conclusion
5. These lectures have been unavoidably descriptive rather than thorough, and yet, as I warned you, descriptive of properties which are in a sense not at all new, but quite familiar, and even trite. You will not feel, at first, that the full interest which I claimed for the science of knowledge, really attaches to these dry relations of abstract thought. You will get no permanent good unless you carry the study forward for yourselves, and use these ideas as a clue to find your bearings in the great world of knowledge.
And I would give you one hint about this. I do not suggest that you should neglect philosophy but yet you should remember that philosophy can tell you no new facts, and can make no discoveries. All that it can tell you is the significant connection of what you already know. And if you know little or nothing, philosophy has little or nothing to tell you. Plato says, “The synoptical man, the man who has a conspectus of knowledge, is the philosopher; and the man who is not synoptical, who cannot see two subjects in their relation, is no philosopher.” By all means read good logical books; but also and more especially read good and thorough systematic books on science, or history, or politics, or fine art—I do not mean on all of these subjects, but on some, wherever your interest leads you. You cannot learn the nature of inference, of systematic necessity, of the construction of reality, by reading logic exclusively; you must {167} feel it and possess it by working in the world of concrete knowledge. I give one example in passing. If you study social questions, test for yourselves the value of statistics—i.e. sets of enumerative judgments. Consider what the causal analysis of any problem demands; remember that all enumeration implies a ground or whole, on which its value depends; and contrast the exhaustive examination of an instance thoroughly known, with the enumeration of thousands of cases lumped under a general predicate. Determine always to know the truth; welcome all information and all suggestion, but remember that truth is always systematic, and that every judgment, when you scrutinise it, demands a fuller and fuller connection with the structure of life. It is not cleverness or learning that makes the philosopher; it is a certain spirit; openness of mind, thoroughness of work, and hatred of superficiality. Each of us, whatever his opportunities, can become in a true sense, if he has the real philosophic spirit, in Plato’s magnificent words, “The spectator of all time and of all existence.”