If any one thinks this is easy, let him try it: the trial will teach
him a lesson respecting the methods of intellectual activity not
without its use. Easy enough, indeed, is the ordinary practice of
experiment, which is either a mere repetition or variation of
experiments already devised (as ordinary story-tellers re-tell the
stories of others), or else a haphazard, blundering way of bringing
phenomena together, to see what will happen. To invent is another
process. The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so
because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts,
almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.
It is the special aim of Philosophy to discover and systematise the
abstract relations of things; and for this purpose it is forced to
allow the things themselves to drop out of sight, fixing attention
solely on the quality immediately investigated, to the neglect of all
other qualities. Thus the philosopher, having to appreciate the mass,
density, refracting power, or chemical constitution of some object,
finds he can best appreciate this by isolating it from every other
detail.
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