THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 721 



Cologne, Frankfort, Vienna, nay, that even the headquarters of geist, 

 Berlin itself, had to wait for light until this Company supplied it, must 

 we not say that more faith in ideas was shown by English than by 

 Germans ? Germans have plenty of energy, are not without desire to 

 make money, and knew that gas was used in England ; and, if neither 

 they nor their Governments undertook the work, we must infer that 

 the benefits and means were inadequately conceived. English enter- 

 prises have often been led by ideas that looked wholly unpractical ; as 

 when the first English steamer astonished the people of Bonn by mak- 

 ing its appearance there, so initiating the Rhine steam-navigation ; or 

 as when the first English steamer started across the Atlantic. Instead 

 of our practice being unideal, the ideas which guide it sometimes verge 

 on the romantic. Fishing-up a cable from the bottom of an ocean 

 three miles deep, was an idea seemingly more fitted for the " The Ara- 

 bian Nights " than for actual life ; yet success proved how truly those 

 who conducted the operation had put together their ideas in correspond- 

 ence with the facts the true test of vivid imagination. 



To show the groundlessness of the notion that new ideas are not 

 evolved and appreciated as much in England as elsewhere, I am 

 tempted here to enumerate our modern inventions of all orders ; from 

 those directly aiming at material results, such as Trevethick's first 

 locomotive, up to the calculating-machines of Babbage and the logic- 

 machine of Jevons, quite remote from practice in their objects. But, 

 merely asserting that those who go through the list will find that 

 neither in number nor in importance do they yield to those of any na- 

 tion during the same period, I refrain from details. Partly I do this 

 because the space required for specifying them would be too great ; 

 and partly because inventions, mostly having immediate bearings on 

 practice, would perhaps not be thought by Mr. Arnold to prove fer- 

 tility of idea : though, considering that each machine is a theory be- 

 fore it becomes a concrete fact, this would be a position difficult to 

 defend. To avoid all possible objection, I will limit myself to scien- 

 tific discovery, from which the element of practice is excluded ; and, 

 to meet the impression that scientific discovery in recent days has not 

 maintained its former pace, I will name only our achievements since 

 1800. 



Taking first the Abstract Sciences, let us ask what has been done 

 in Logic. We have the brief but pregnant statement of inductive 

 methods by Sir John Herschel, leading to the definite systematization 

 of them by Mr. Mill ; and we have, in the work of Prof. Bain, elab- 

 orately-illustrated applications of logical methods to science and to 

 the business of life. Deductive Logic, too, has been developed by a 

 further conception. The doctrine of the quantification of the predicate, 

 set forth in 1827 by Mr. George Bentham, and again set forth under a 

 numerical form by Prof. De Morgan, is a doctrine supplementary 

 to that of Aristotle ; and the recognition of it has made it easier than 

 vol. 11. 46 



