ABSTRACT
The simplest perception contains an element of immediate sense experience, and an element of mental interpretation that is purposive. The highest scientific thinking seems merely to delay the union of these two. Sigmund Freud influence upon the development of a scientific logic will be but a further extension of the influence of Charles Darwin. Darwin's influence destroyed for all matter-of-fact scientific minds the metaphysical pretensions of human thought. In the meantime, which is likely to be forever, the highest kind of thinking and the most "scientific", is not that which makes the most grandiose pretence to universality, but that which most carefully and candidly acknowledges the specific problem out of which it arose, and the purpose which made that specific thing a problem. That is the intellectual outcome of Darwin's application of the idea of evolution to organic life. It is the establishment of a new kind of humble scientific candour—an attitude which may be described as affirmative scientific scepticism.
