And he is quite logical in maintaining
his position on these principles. For, where it is either
difficult or impossible to assign any rational cause for phenomena,
or to discover their laws, he acquiesces reluctantly in the
alternative of admitting some extra-natural interference which his
essentially scientific method of treating the matter has logically
forced on him, approving, for instance, of prayers for rain, on the
express ground that the laws of meteorology had not yet been
ascertained. He would, of course, have been the first to welcome
our modern discoveries in the matter. The passage in question is
in every way one of the most interesting in his whole work, not, of
course, as signifying any inclination on his part to acquiesce in
the supernatural, but because it shows how essentially logical and
rational his method of argument was, and how candid and fair his
mind.
Having now examined Polybius's attitude towards the supernatural
and the general ideas which guided his research, I will proceed to
examine the method he pursued in his scientific investigation of
the complex phenomena of life. For, as I have said before in the
course of this essay, what is important in all great writers is not
so much the results they arrive at as the methods they pursue.
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