ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE, n 



something similar to the development of taste ; but taste, unfortu- 

 nately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly 

 metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pen- 

 dulum has swung backward and forward between a more material 

 and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. 

 And so from this, which has been called the a priori method, we are 

 driven, in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction. We have ex- 

 amined into this a priori method as something which promised to 

 deliver our opinions from their accidental and capricious element. 

 But development, while it is a process which eliminates the effect 

 of some casual circumstances, only magnifies that of others. This 

 method, therefore, does not differ in a very essential way from that of 

 authority. The government may not have lifted its linger to influ- 

 ence my convictions ; I may have been left outwardly quite free to 

 choose, we will say, between monogamy and polygamy, and, appeal- 

 ing to my conscience only, I may have concluded that the latter prac- 

 tice is in itself licentious. But when I come to see that the chief 

 obstacle to the spread of Christianity among a people of as high cult- 

 ure as the Hindoos has been a conviction of the immorality of our 

 way of treating women, I cannot help seeing that, though govern- 

 ments do not interfere, sentiments in their development will be very 

 greatly determined by accidental causes. Now, there are some peo- 

 ple, among whom I must suppose that my reader is to be found, who, 

 when they see that any belief of theirs is determined by any circum- 

 stance extraneous to the facts, will from that moment not merely 

 admit in words that that belief is doubtful, but will experience a real 

 doubt of it, so that it ceases to be a belief. 



To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method 

 should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by nothing hu- 

 man, but by some external permanency by something upon which 

 our thinking has no effect. Some mystics imagine that they have 

 such a method in a private inspiration from on high. But that is 

 only a form of the method of tenacity, in which the conception of 

 truth as something public is not yet developed. Our external perma- 

 nency would not be external, in our sense, if it was restricted in its 

 influence to one individual. It must be something which affects, or 

 might affect, every man. And, though these affections are necessarily 

 as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such 

 that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is 

 the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more 

 familiar language, is this : There are real things, whose characters 

 are entirely independent of our opinions about them ; those realities 

 affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensa- 

 tions are as different as our relations to the objects, yet, by taking 

 advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning 

 how things really are, and any man, if he have sufficient experience 



