The Method by which the Causes of the Present and Past Conditions of Organic Nature Are to Be Disco | Page 7

that, you notice the impress of a hob-nailed shoe on the gravel outside.
All these phenomena have struck your attention instantly, and before
two minutes have passed you say, "Oh, somebody has broken open the
window, entered the room, and run off with the spoons and the
tea-pot!" That speech is out of your mouth in a moment. And you will
probably add, "I know there has; I am quite sure of it!" You mean to
say exactly what you know; but in reality what you have said has been
the expression of what is, in all essential particulars, an Hypothesis.
You do not 'know' it at all; it is nothing but an hypothesis rapidly
framed in your own mind! And it is an hypothesis founded on a long
train of inductions and deductions.
What are those inductions and deductions, and how have you got at this
hypothesis? You have observed, in the first place, that the window is
open; but by a train of reasoning involving many Inductions and
Deductions, you have probably arrived long before at the General
Law--and a very good one it is--that windows do not open of
themselves; and you therefore conclude that something has opened the
window. A second general law that you have arrived at in the same way
is, that tea-pots and spoons do not go out of a window spontaneously,
and you are satisfied that, as they are not now where you left them, they
have been removed. In the third place, you look at the marks on the
window-sill, and the shoemarks outside, and you say that in all
previous experience the former kind of mark has never been produced
by anything else but the hand of a human being; and the same
experience shows that no other animal but man at present wears shoes
with hob-nails on them such as would produce the marks in the gravel.
I do not know, even if we could discover any of those "missing links"
that are talked about, that they would help us to any other conclusion!
At any rate the law which states our present experience is strong

enough for my present purpose.--You next reach the conclusion, that as
these kinds of marks have not been left by any other animals than men,
or are liable to be formed in any other way than by a man's hand and
shoe, the marks in question have been formed by a man in that way.
You have, further, a general law, founded on observation and
experience, and that, too, is, I am sorry to say, a very universal and
unimpeachable one,--that some men are thieves; and you assume at
once from all these premisses--and that is what constitutes your
hypothesis--that the man who made the marks outside and on the
window-sill, opened the window, got into the room, and stole your
tea-pot and spoons. You have now arrived at a 'Vera Causa';--you have
assumed a Cause which it is plain is competent to produce all the
phenomena you have observed. You can explain all these phenomena
only by the hypothesis of a thief. But that is a hypothetical conclusion,
of the justice of which you have no absolute proof at all; it is only
rendered highly probable by a series of inductive and deductive
reasonings.
I suppose your first action, assuming that you are a man of ordinary
common sense, and that you have established this hypothesis to your
own satisfaction, will very likely be to go off for the police, and set
them on the track of the burglar, with the view to the recovery of your
property. But just as you are starting with this object, some person
comes in, and on learning what you are about, says, "My good friend,
you are going on a great deal too fast. How do you know that the man
who really made the marks took the spoons? It might have been a
monkey that took them, and the man may have merely looked in
afterwards." You would probably reply, "Well, that is all very well, but
you see it is contrary to all experience of the way tea-pots and spoons
are abstracted; so that, at any rate, your hypothesis is less probable than
mine." While you are talking the thing over in this way, another friend
arrives, one of that good kind of people that I was talking of a little
while ago. And he might say, "Oh, my dear sir, you are certainly going
on a great deal too fast. You are most presumptuous. You admit that all
these occurrences took place when you were fast asleep, at a time when
you could not possibly have known anything about what was taking
place. How do you know that the laws of Nature are