180 EXPLANATIONS. 



I 



cess of tracing regularity in any complicated and 

 at first sight confused set of appearances, is ne- 

 cessarily tentative : we begin by making any sup- 

 position, even a false one, to see Mrhat conse- 

 quences will follow from it ; and by observing 

 how these differ from the real phenomena, we 

 learn what corrections to make in our assump- 

 tion. . . ' Some fact,' says M. Comte, ' is as yet 

 little understood, or some law is unknown : we 

 frame on the subject an hypothesis as accordant 

 as possible with the whole of the data already 

 possessed ; and the science, being thus enabled 

 to move forward freely, always ends by leading to 

 new consequences capable of observation, which 

 either confirm or refute, unequivocally, the first 

 supposition.' . . . Let any one watch the manner 

 in which he himself unravels any complicated 

 mass of evidence ; let him observe, how, for 

 instance, he elicits the true history of any occur- 

 rence from the involved statements of one or of 

 many witnesses : he will find that he does not 

 take all the items of evidence into his mind at 

 once, and attempt to weave them together : the 

 human faculties are not equal to such an under- 

 taking ; he extemporizes, from a few of the parti- 

 culars, a first rude theory of the mode in which 

 the facts took place, and then looks at the other 



