148 GENERAL VIEW AND BASIS OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 



of ages ; and it is usually those who least possess it who 

 most doubt its power. And however sure we may feel 

 of the facts of consciousness, and of any unprovable or 

 undisprovable hypothesis in science inferred from them, 

 we are morally bound to feel still more certain of the 

 verified truths of the intellect, because they are them- 

 selves the facts of consciousness, corrected by the intel- 

 lectual powers. .However uncertain also the conclusions 

 of the intellect may be assumed to be, those of unconnected 

 feeling and consciousness are much more so. ' Greater 

 liability to error on account of greater complexity does not 

 necessarily render reason less trustworthy. True, it is not 

 so easy to add up a long column of figures as it is to add 

 five to five, but surely the result admits of as much cor- 

 rectness in the former instance as in the latter.' l 



CHAPTER XL 



TRUSTWORTHINESS AND ACCURACY IN SCIENCE. 



THAT which is not to be depended upon is not science ; 

 assumptions and hypotheses are also not strict science, but 

 only a means towards discovering it. Trustworthiness is 

 the first object, and accuracy the perfection and final aim 

 of science. Trustworthiness and accuracy may be regarded 

 as not synonymous terms, the former representing a logical 

 idea only, or one of matter of fact ; the latter a quanti- 

 tative one. Adopting this difference of meaning of terms, 

 we may say that it is more important to be trustworthy 

 than accurate, because the former affects the fact itself, 



1 Rev. W. Gr. Davies on ' The Law of Certainty,' Psychological Jour- 

 nal, 1863, pp. 454, 455. 



