ETHOLOGY. 457 



general laws had not indeed at first the acknowledged univer 

 sality which they acquired after having been successfully 

 employed to explain many classes of phenomena to which they 

 were not originally seen to he applicable ; as when the laws 

 of motion were employed, in conjunction with other laws, 

 to explain deductively the celestial phenomena. Still, the 

 fact remains, that the propositions which were afterwards 

 recognised as the most general truths of the science, were, of 

 all its accurate generalizations, those earliest arrived at. 

 Bacon s greatest merit cannot therefore consist, as we are so 

 often told that it did, in exploding the vicious method pursued 

 by the ancients of flying to the highest generalizations first, 

 and deducing the middle principles from them ; since this 

 is neither a vicious nor an exploded, but the universally 

 accredited method of modern science, and that to which it 

 owes its greatest triumphs. The error of ancient speculation 

 did not consist in making the largest generalizations first, but 

 in making them without the aid or warrant of rigorous in 

 ductive methods, and applying them deductively without the 

 needful use of that important part of the Deductive Method 

 termed Verification. 



The order in which truths of the various degrees of gene 

 rality should be ascertained, cannot, I apprehend, be prescribed 

 by any unbending rule. I know of no maxim which can be 

 laid down on the subject, but to obtain those first, in respect 

 to which the conditions of a real induction can be first and 

 most completely realized. Now, wherever our means of inves 

 tigation can reach causes, without stopping at the empirical , 

 laws of the effects, the simplest cases, being those in which 

 fewest causes are simultaneously concerned, will be most 

 amenable to the inductive process ; and these are the cases 

 which elicit laws of the greatest comprehensiveness. In every 

 science, therefore, which has reached the stage at which it 

 becomes a science of causes, it will be usual as well as desirable 

 first to obtain the highest generalizations, and then deduce 

 the more special ones from them. Nor can I discover any 

 foundation for the Baconian maxim, so much extolled by 

 subsequent writers, except this: That before we attempt to 



