Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/350

Rh let us discover the fact, and see clearly just why it is worth while to act in this way.

To speak more particularly of the postulates of developed science. The ancient discussions about the basis of physical knowledge of all sorts have had at least this as outcome, that it is useless to pretend to make science of any sort do without assumptions, and equally useless to undertake the demonstration of these assumptions by experience alone. No one has ever succeeded in accomplishing such a thing, and the only difference among thinkers about these assumptions is that some think it worth while to seek a transcendental basis for them all, while others insist that a transcendental basis is as impossible as a purely experimental basis is inadequate, and that in consequence we can only use the form of threat and say: Unless you make these assumptions, the spirit of science is not in you. As for the exact form that in more elaborate scientific work ought to be taken by these postulates, opinion differs very much, but an approximation to their sense may be attempted very briefly as follows.

In addition to those postulates that, as we have seen, accompany and condition all thinking alike, science may be considered as making a more special assumption. This assumption has been well defined by Professor Avenarius, in his well-known essay on “Die Philosophie als Denken der Welt Gemäss dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmasses.” He regards it as an outcome of the general law of parsimony that governs all mental work. The world of phenomena is conceived at any stage in the simplest form, and