Later Greek Logic

His influence on successors has rather lain in the general stimulus of his enthusiasm for experience, or in the success with which he represents the cause of nominalism, and in certain special devices of method handed down, till through Hume or Herschel they affected the thought of Mill. For the rest he was too Aristotelian, if we take the word broadly enough, or, as the result of his Cambridge studies, too Ramist, when the interest in scholastic issues was fading, to bring his original ideas to a successful market.

Bacon's Logic, then, like Galilei's, intended as a contribution to scientific method, a systematization of discovery by which, given the fact of knowledge, new items of knowledge may be acquired, failed to convince contemporaries and successors alike of its efficiency as an instrument. It was an ideal that failed to embody itself and justify itself by its fruits. It was otherwise with the mathematical instrument of Galilei.

Descartes

stands in the following of Galilei. It is concurrently with signal success in the work of a pioneer in the mathematical advance that he comes to reflect on method, generalizes the method of mathematics to embrace knowledge as a whole, and raises the ultimate issues of its presuppositions. In the mathe matics we determine complex problems by a construction link by link from axioms and simple data clearly and distinctly con ceived. Three moments are involved. The first is an induction,

i.e., an exhaustive enumeration of the simple elements in the complex phenomenon under investigation. This resolution or analysis into simple, because clear and distinct, elements may be brought to a standstill again and again by obscurity and indis tinctness, but patient and repeated revision of all that is in cluded in the problem should bring the analytic process to fruition. It is impatience, a perversity of will, that is the cause of error. Upon the analysis there results intuition of the simple data. With Descartes intuition does not connote givenness, but its objects are evident at a glance when induction had brought them to light. Lastly we have deduction, the determination of the most complex phenomena by a continuous synthesis or combination of the simple elements. Synthesis is demonstrative and complete. It is in virtue of this view of derived or mediate knowledge that Descartes speaks of the (subsumptive) syllogism as "of avail rather in the communication of what we already know." Syl logism is not the synthesis which together with analysis goes to constitute the new instrument of science. The celebrated Regulae of Descartes are precepts directed to the achievement of the new methodological ideal in any and every subject matter, how ever reluctant.