Note 130 — Chapter VI · The Era of Handicraft122

This, of course, does not overlook the fact that in the course of scientific inquiry there has been an increasing use of statistical methods and results, and that this recourse to statistics has been of an increasingly objective character, both in its methods and in the items handled. It is also to be noted that from time to time serious and consequential attempts have been made to reduce scientific argument at large to similarly objective terms of quantity, quantivalence and concomitance. Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science, for instance is a shrewd and somewhat popularly known endeavour of this kind. So, again, the philosophical views associated with the names of Leibnitz and of Berkely are of this nature, and there is not a little of the same line of scepticism in the speculations of Hume. But it is equally to be noted that except on the remote plane of generality that belongs to philosophical speculation, and except in the works of pure mathematics, this method of handling facts has not proved available for scientific ends. The “idle curiosity” which finds employment in scientific inquiry is not content with the vacant relation of concomitance alone among the facts which it seeks and systematises. In scientific theory no headway has been made hitherto without the use of this indispensable imputation of causality.—In this connection cf. a paper on “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View,” University of California Chronicle, November, 1908, especially footnote, p. 396.