‘The book was completed in the year 765.’[380]
The number 106, which according to the colophon is the number of chapters in the book, is really the number of titles in the MS. written in large hand. Fragments of many chapters whose titles are lost still remain in it however, while many of the chapters that have preserved their titles are no longer complete.
Again it may be pointed out that all the known medical works of Maimonides were written in Arabic and therefore did not need to be translated into that language as the Bodleian MS. claims to have been. The spurious title-page thus further betrays itself by saying that this work was translated from Hebrew.
Finally, the identification of the real contents of the Paris MS. disposes of the last foundation of the idea that Maimonides wrote any compendium of medicine known as كتاب الاسباب والعلامات (Tractatus de Causis et Indiciis Morborum), and clears up the confusion caused by the faulty entries in the Paris and Bodleian catalogues.
SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND LOGICAL PROOF
By F. C. S. Schiller
§ 1. Among the obstacles to scientific progress a high place must certainly be assigned to the analysis of scientific procedure which Logic has provided. This analysis has not only been inadequate in itself, but has set itself a mistaken aim. It has not tried to describe the methods by which the sciences have actually advanced, and to extract from their experience the logical rules which might be used to regulate scientific progress, but has treated scientific discoveries almost entirely as illustrations of a preconceived ideal of proof, and so has freely rearranged the actual procedure in accordance with its prejudices. For the order of discovery there has been substituted an order of ‘proof’, and this substitution has been justified by the assumption that if discovery had taken the ideally best course, it would have coincided with the process of proof. It followed, of course, that the same logic would do for both, and that this logic was already in existence.
The damage thus inflicted upon Science was twofold. Not only were the logicians given a plausible excuse for persisting in their profound misapprehension of scientific inquiry and rendered incapable of giving any help or guidance in the solution of actual problems, but, what was much worse, the scientists themselves were misled about the nature of their operations.