458 LOGIC OP THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



explain deductively from more general laws any new class of 

 phenomena, it is desirable to have gone as far as is practicable 

 in ascertaining the empirical laws of those phenomena; so 

 as to compare the results of deduction, not with one individual 

 instance after another, but with general propositions ex- 

 pressive of the points of agreement which have been found 

 among many instances. For if Newton had been obliged to 

 verify the theory of gravitation, not by deducing from it 

 Kepler's laws, but by deducing all the observed planetary 

 positions which had served Kepler to establish those laws, the 

 Newtonian theory would probably never have emerged from 

 the state of an hypothesis.* 



The applicability of these remarks to the special case under 

 consideration, cannot admit of question. The science of the 

 formation of character is a science of causes. The subject is 

 one to which those among the canons of induction, by which 

 laws of causation are ascertained, can be rigorously applied. 

 It is, therefore, both natural and advisable to ascertain the 

 simplest, which are necessarily the most general, laws of 

 causation first, and to deduce the middle principles from them. 

 In other words, Ethology, the deductive science, is a system 

 of corollaries from Psychology, the experimental science. 



* "To which," says Dr. Whewell, "we may add, that it is certain from 

 the history of the subject, that in that case the hypothesis would never have 

 been framed at all." 



Dr. Whewell (Philosophy of Itiscovery, pp. 277282) defends Bacon's rule 

 against the preceding strictures. But his defence consists only in asserting and 

 exemplifying a proposition which I had myself stated, viz. that though the 

 largest generalizations may be the earliest made, they are not at first seen in 

 their entire generality, but acquire it by degrees, as they are found to explain 

 one class after another of phenomena. The laws of motion, for example, were 

 not known to extend to the celestial regions, until the motions of the celestial 

 bodies had been deduced from them. This however does not in any way affect 

 the fact, that the middle principles of astronomy, the central force for example, 

 and the law of the inverse square, could not have been discovered, if the laws 

 of motion, which are so much more universal, had not been known first. On 

 Bacon's system of step-by-step generalization, it would be impossible in any 

 science to ascend higher than the empirical laws ; a remark which Dr. Whe- 

 well's own Inductive Tables, referred to by him in support of his argument, 

 amply bear out. 



