144 GENEEAL YIEW AND BASIS OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 



their complexity being so great, and other causes, also 

 prevent us attaining the ^highest degree of certainty of 

 results. Others, again, are so interwoven with errors, pre- 

 judices, human desires and feelings, improvable beliefs, 

 superstitions, dogmatic assertions, and various other ob- 

 stacles, that they are, in the 'present state of knowledge, 

 almost hopeless as fruitful sources of certainty ; and how- 

 ever uncertain the simple physical sciences are assumed 

 to be, such subjects are far more uncertain. History 

 melts away, but verifiable experimental truth is con- 

 tinually renewed. As facts differ from hypotheses, so do 

 scientific researches differ from many of the stagnant 

 doctrines of sectarian minds. Research in some subjects 

 only leads to vague results and uncertain opinions, whilst 

 in others conclusions of the most definite character may 

 be arrived at, provided the investigations are thoroughly 

 carried out. A high degree of certainty cannot be attained 

 by means of research in any subject the fundamental 

 statements of which have never been proved and cannot 

 be verified. 



The chief reasons why the beliefs we acquire from ob- 

 servations and inferences in physics and chemistry are 

 considered by some persons to be so highly certain in 

 comparison with some other kinds of beliefs, are because 

 those sciences are amongst the simplest ones, the truths of 

 them may usually be verified by any person at any time 

 and in any place, and particularly because they may 

 be checked and confirmed by experiment and observation 

 in an almost infinite number of ways, and be thus found 

 to support each other so as to form a consistent and syste- 

 matic whole. Other branches of knowledge also possess 

 some of the same qualities, but in different degrees. 

 Nothing is as truly noble as pure truth ; and the essential 

 nobility of the mathematical, experimental, and observa- 



