Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/33



§ 1. The Method.
THE divine Plato and the marvellous Kant unite their mighty voices in recommending a rule, to serve as the method of all philosophising as well as of all other science. Two laws, they tell us: the law of homogeneity and the law of specification, should be equally observed, neither to the disadvantage of the other. The law of homogeneity directs us to collect things together into kind, by observing their resemblances and correspondences, to collect kinds again into species, species into genera, and so on, till at last we come to the highest all-comprehensive conception. Now this law, being transcendental, i.e. essential to our Reason, takes for granted that Nature conforms with it: an assumption which is expressed by the ancient formula, entia præter necessitatem non esse multiplicanda.