142 ON THE ORIGIN OF THE PLANETARY SYSTEM. 



name is occasionally misused, to recommend that 

 natural philosophy shall leave the inductive method, 

 by which it has become great, to revert to the windy 

 speculations of a so-called 'deductive method.' No 

 one would have attacked such a misuse, more ener- 

 getically and more incisively, than Kant himself 

 if he were still among us. 



The same hypothesis as to the origin of our 

 planetary system was advanced a second time, but 

 apparently quite independently of Kant, by the most 

 celebrated of French astronomers, Simon, Marquis de 

 Laplace. It formed, as it were, the final conclusion of 

 his work on the mechanism of our system, executed 

 with such gigantic industry and great mathematical 

 acuteness. You see from the names of these two men, 

 whom we meet as experienced and tried leaders in our 

 course, that in a view in which they both agree, we 

 have not to deal with a mere random guess, but with a 

 careful and well-considered attempt to deduce conclu- 

 sions as to the unknown past from known conditions of 

 the present time. 



It is in the nature of the case, that a hypothesis as 

 to the origin of the world which we inhabit, and 

 which deals with things in the most distant past, 

 cannot be verified by direct observation. It may, how- 

 ever, receive direct confirmation, if, in the progress of 

 scientific knowledge, new facts accrue to those already 



