  But there is something else at work here as well. Dingle doesn’t object solely to his opponents’ lack of inductive logic. Of equal importance is the fact that they find the source of their hypotheses in fairly general principles, wide-ranging rational proposals about the structure of the universe at large. These principles Dingle takes to be a priori, in the most pejorative sense of that term. They are phantasms, “chimeras” he calls them, which seduce the imaginations of his opponents, and lead them and their dumb-struck admirers away from the genuine, authentic method of science. This is what really sticks in Dingle’s craw. In turn, Eddington, Milne and Dirac are chastised, each for something slightly different, but at bottom the same, namely, they one and all “appear as a victim of the great ‘Universe’ mania” (Dingle 1937, p. 786). In the end, Dingle believes, the danger of this new ‘methodology’ is real, and serious. As he notes in conclusion: