WHAT IS CREATION? 217 



is the sense in which we shall use the term, as it 

 corresponds accurately enough with its ordinary 

 signification in modern philosophy and science. 



It is obvious that in inquiries which are concerned 

 in the discovery of natural law, it is highly service- 

 able, nay, absolutely necessary, to generalise or to 

 make inferences of a more or less sweeping character 

 for the purpose of giving definiteness and directness 

 to further observations or experiments. Faraday 

 speaks of the hosts of such deductions that he was 

 continually fashioning and slaying in his magnificent 

 researches. The value of a theory framed thus will 

 of course be determined by the number of facts that 

 it harmonises. A mere figment of the imagination 

 may serve to guide observation, but it will not, 

 ordinarily, be so fruitful in results as the hypothesis 

 which is suggested by some fact or phenomenon 

 that it seems to explain. Occasionally a happy 

 guess may turn out to have hit upon a universal 

 law, but that will be a very remarkable exception. 

 The old saying that "Nature abhors a vacuum" gives 

 no reason why water rises in the pump. But the 

 theory that the phenomenon results from the pres- 

 sure of the atmosphere upon the water outside the 

 piston or sucker of the pump is so closely allied 

 with many other similar phenomena, such as the 

 rise and fall of the mercury in the thermometer 

 and barometer, and the changes in the level of the 

 mercury as the instrument is carried up a mountain, 

 that no one now thinks of disputing the accuracy of 

 this explanation. 



John Stuart Mill made it the chief aim of his 



