78 LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, AND REVIEWS, [v 



prompt to follow it on the instant. But, after all, the 

 sword exercise is only the hewing and poking of the 

 clubman developed and perfected. 



So, the vast results obtained by Science are won 

 by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes, other 

 than those which are practised by every one of us, 

 in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective 

 policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made 

 by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that 

 by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Mont- 

 martre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that 

 process of induction and deduction by which a lady, 

 finding a stain of a peculiar kind upon her dress, con- 

 cludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, 

 differ in any way, in kind, from that by which Adams 

 and Leverrier discovered a new planet. 



The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scru- 

 pulous exactness, the methods which we all, habitually 

 and at every moment, use carelessly ; and the man 

 of business must as much avail himself of the scientific 

 method — must be as truly a man of science — as the 

 veriest bookworm of us all : though I have no doubt 

 that the man of business will find himself out to be a 

 philosopher with as much surprise as M. Jourdain 

 exhibited, when he discovered that he had been all 

 his life talking prose. If, however, there be no real 

 difference between the methods of science and those 

 of common life, it would seem, on the face of the 

 matter, highly improbable that there should be any 

 difference between the methods of the different sciences ; 

 nevertheless, it is constantly taken for granted, that 

 there is a very wide difference between the Physiological 

 and other sciences in point of method. 



In the first place it is said — and I take this point 

 first, because the imputation is too frequently admitted 



