The Limitations of Scholarship

If you have a system which doesn't change, then you can predict what will happen in the thing. You can't do positive science in a world of total change. Innis is saying that those functions change and so you know, what you would predict on the basis of the numbers you have today is going to be wrong. The fact of unpredictable, discontinuous change and the problem of bias were both, for innis, sobering indications of the limitations of thought. When he criticised his colleagues for offering nostrums against the depression, he did not say their ideas were wrong as such. He said they were wrong to address the public with such misleading confidence.