Knowledge Through Disciplic Succession 53
authoritative lawyers, engineers and doctors. A new lawyer has to become an apprentice of an experienced lawyer, or a young man studying to be a doctor has to become an intern and work with those who are already licensed practitioners. Our knowledge of a subject cannot be perfectionalized unless we receive it through authoritative sources.
There are two processes for attaining knowledge—one is inductive and the other is deductive. The deductive method is considered to be more perfect. We may take a premise such as, “All men are mortal,” and no one need discuss how man is mortal. It is generally accepted that this is the case. The deductive conclusion is: “Mr. Johnson is a man; therefore Mr. Johnson is mortal.” But how is the premise that all men are mortal arrived at? Followers of the inductive method wish to arrive at this premise through experiment and observations. We may thus study that this man died and that man died, etc., and after seeing that so many men have died we may conclude or generalize that all men are mortal, but there is a major defect in this inductive method, and that is that our experience is limited. We may never have seen a man who is not mortal, but we are judging this on our personal experience, which is finite. Our senses have limited power, and there are so many defects in our conditional state. The inductive process consequently is not always perfect, whereas the deductive process from a source of perfect knowledge is perfect. The Vedic process is such a process.
Although the authority is acknowledged, there are many passages in  Bhagavad-gītā  which appear to