5o 4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



selves, are abstracted from anthropomorphic fancies, which science for- 

 bids us to believe and nature compels us to employ. 



We here touch the fringe of a series of problems with which induct- 

 ive logic ought to deal; but which that most unsatisfactory branch of 

 philosophy has systematically ignored. This is no fault of men of 

 science. They are occupied in the task of making discoveries, not in 

 that of analyzing the fundamental presuppositions which the very pos- 

 sibility of making discoveries implies. Neither is it the fault of trans- 

 cendental metaphysicians. Their speculations flourish on a different 

 level of thought : their interest in a philosophy of nature is lukewarm ; 

 and howsoever the questions in which they are chiefly concerned be 

 answered, it is by no means certain that the answers will leave the 

 humbler difficulties at which I have hinted either nearer to, or further 

 from, a solution. But though men of science and idealists stand ac- 

 quitted, the same can hardly be said of empirical philosophers. So 

 far from solving the problem, they seem scarcely to have understood 

 that there was a problem to be solved. Led astray by a misconception 

 to which I have already referred; believing that science was concerned 

 only with (so-called) 'phenomena,' that it had done all that it could 

 be asked to do if it accounted for the sequence of our individual sen- 

 sations, that it was concerned only with the ' laws of nature,' and not 

 with the inner character of physical reality; disbelieving, indeed, that 

 any such physical reality does in truth exist; — it has never felt called 

 upon seriously to consider what are the actual methods by which sci- 

 ence attains its results, and how those methods are to be justified. If 

 any one, for example, will take up Mill's logic, with its ' sequences and 

 coexistences between phenomena,' its ' method of difference,' its 

 ' method of agreement,' and the rest : if he will then compare the actual 

 doctrines of science with this version of the mode in which those doc- 

 trines have been arrived at, he will soon be convinced of the exceed- 

 ingly thin intellectual fare which has so often been served out to us 

 under the imposing title of inductive theory. 



There is an added emphasis given to these reflections by a train of 

 thought which has long interested me, though I acknowledge that it 

 never seems to have interested any one else. Observe, then, that in 

 order of logic sense perceptions supply the premises from which we 

 draw all our knowledge of the physical world. It is they which tell 

 us there is a physical world; it is on their authority that we learn its 

 character. But in order of causation they are effects due (in part) to 

 the constitution of our organs of sense. What we see depends not 

 merely on what there is to be seen, but on our eyes. What we hear 

 depends not merely on what there is to hear, but on our ears. Now, 

 eyes and ears, and all the mechanism of perception, have, as we know, 

 been evolved in us and our brute progenitors by the slow operation of 



