The Method by which the Causes of the Present and Past Conditions of Organic Nature Are to Be Disco | Page 5

genius
of Lord Chancellor Bacon. He was undoubtedly a very great man, let
people say what they will of him; but notwithstanding all that he did for
philosophy, it would be entirely wrong to suppose that the methods of
modern scientific inquiry originated with him, or with his age; they
originated with the first man, whoever he was; and indeed existed long
before him, for many of the essential processes of reasoning are exerted
by the higher order of brutes as completely and effectively as by
ourselves. We see in many of the brute creation the exercise of one, at
least, of the same powers of reasoning as that which we ourselves
employ.
The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of

the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the
mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and
exact. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of
difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and
those of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and
methods of a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common
scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and
complex analysis by means of his balance and finely-graduated weights.
It is not that the action of the scales in the one case, and the balance in
the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of
working; but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the
other, and of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.
You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some familiar
example. You have all heard it repeated, I dare say, that men of science
work by means of Induction and Deduction, and that by the help of
these operations, they, in a sort of sense, wring from Nature certain
other things, which are called Natural Laws, and Causes, and that out of
these, by some cunning skill of their own, they build up Hypotheses
and Theories. And it is imagined by many, that the operations of the
common mind can be by no means compared with these processes, and
that they have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship to the
craft. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a
man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow
men; but if you will not be frightened by terms, you will discover that
you are quite wrong, and that all these terrible apparatus are being used
by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives.
There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere's plays, where the
author makes the hero express unbounded delight on being told that he
had been talking prose during the whole of his life. In the same way, I
trust, that you will take comfort, and be delighted with yourselves, on
the discovery that you have been acting on the principles of inductive
and deductive philosophy during the same period. Probably there is not
one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in
motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though
differing of course in degree, as that which a scientific man goes
through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.
A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this. Suppose you

go into a fruiterer's shop, wanting an apple,--you take up one, and, on
biting it, you find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard and
green. You take up another one, and that too is hard, green, and sour.
The shopman offers you a third; but, before biting it, you examine it,
and find that it is hard and green, and you immediately say that you
will not have it, as it must be sour, like those that you have already
tried.
Nothing can be more simple than that, you think; but if you will take
the trouble to analyze and trace out into its logical elements what has
been done by the mind, you will be greatly surprised. In the first place,
you have performed the operation of Induction. You found that, in two
experiences, hardness and greenness in apples go together with
sourness. It was so in the first case, and it was confirmed by the second.
True, it is a very small basis, but still it is enough to make an induction
from; you generalize the facts, and you expect to find sourness in
apples where you get hardness and greenness. You found upon that a
general law, that all hard and green