Our own doctrine is that not all knowledge is demonstrative: on
the contrary, knowledge of the immediate premisses is independent of
demonstration. (The necessity of this is obvious; for since we must
know the prior premisses from which the demonstration is drawn, and
since the regress must end in immediate truths, those truths must be
indemonstrable.) Such, then, is our doctrine, and in addition we
maintain that besides scientific knowledge there is its originative
source which enables us to recognize the definitions.
Now demonstration must be based on premisses prior to and better
known than the conclusion; and the same things cannot simultaneously
be both prior and posterior to one another: so circular
demonstration is clearly not possible in the unqualified sense of
'demonstration', but only possible if 'demonstration' be extended to
include that other method of argument which rests on a distinction
between truths prior to us and truths without qualification prior,
i.e. the method by which induction produces knowledge. But if we
accept this extension of its meaning, our definition of unqualified
knowledge will prove faulty; for there seem to be two kinds of it.
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