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 de-
ductive 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 conse-
quently 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-gita which appear to
