FORE:Punctuality costs nothing, and buys a great deal; a learner who reaches the shop a quarter of an hour before starting time, and spends that time in looking about, manifests thereby an interest in the work, and avails himself of an important privilege, one of the most effectual in gaining shop knowledge. Ten minutes spent in walking about, noting the changes wrought in the work from day to day, furnishes constant material for thought, and acquaints a learner with many things which would otherwise escape attention. It requires, however, no little care and discrimination to avoid a kind of resentment which workmen feel in having their work examined, especially if they have met with an accident or made a mistake, and when such inspection is thought to be [168] prompted by curiosity only. The better plan in such cases is to ask permission to examine work in such a way that no one will hear the request except the person addressed; such an application generally will secure both consent and explanation.Aristotle even goes so far as to eliminate the notion of sequence from causation altogether. He tells us that the causes of events are contemporary with the events themselves; those of past events being past; of present events, present; and of future events, future. This thing will not be because that other thing has happened, for the middle term must be homogeneous with the extremes.282 It is obvious that such a limitation abolishes the power of scientific prediction, which, if not the only test of knowledge, is at any rate its most valuable verification. The Stagirite has been charged with trusting too much to deductive reasoning; it now appears that, on the contrary, he had no conception of its most important function. Here, as everywhere, he follows not the synthetic method of the mathematician, but the analytic method of the naturalist. Finally, instead of combining the notions of cause and kind, he systematically confuses them. It will be remembered how his excellent division of causes into material, formal, efficient, and final, was rendered nugatory by the continued influence of Platos ideas. The formal cause always tended to absorb the other three; and it is by their complete assimilation that he attempts to harmonise the order of demonstration with the order of existence. For the formal cause of a phenomenon simply meant those properties which it shared with others of the same kind, and it was by virtue of those properties that it became a subject for general reasoning, which was interpreted as a methodical arrangement of concepts one within another, answering to the concentric disposition of the cosmic spheres.
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