514 EDUCATION 



judged accordingly as I have, or have not, followed the established 

 rules under which all science has been created hitherto, or that 

 the reader shall plainly think out his reasons for rejecting them. 

 Conceivably these established rules are wrong. But in that case 

 they should be shown to be wrong. To imply, as is so often done, 

 that they are wrong merely by setting up private, unexplained, 

 and apparently indefensible standards for evidence and proof is to 

 destroy the distinction between scientific and sectarian thinking 

 is to render scientific discussion as futile and scientific dissension 

 as unappeasable as the discussions and dissensions of religious 

 factions. 



838. " Principles of Evidence and Theories of Method are not 

 to be constructed a priori. The laws of our rational faculty, like 

 those of every other natural agency, are only learnt by seeing 

 the agent at work. The earlier achievements of science were made 

 without the conscious observance of any Scientific Method ; and 

 we should never have known by what process truth is to be 

 ascertained if we had not previously ascertained many truths. 

 But it was only the easier problems that could be thus resolved : 

 natural sagacity, when it tried its strength against the more difficult 

 ones, either failed altogether, or if it succeeded here and there in 

 obtaining a solution, had no sure means of convincing others that 

 its solution was correct. In scientific investigation, as in all other 

 works of human skill, the way of obtaining the end is seen, as it 

 were, instinctively by superior minds in some comparatively simple 

 case, and is then, by judicious generalization, adapted to the 

 variety of complex cases. We learn to do a thing in difficult 

 circumstances by attending to the manner in which we have 

 spontaneously done the same thing in easier ones. 



839. " This truth is exemplified by the history of the various 

 branches of knowledge which have successively, in the ascending 

 order of their complication, assumed the character of sciences ; and 

 will doubtless receive fresh confirmation from those of which the final 

 scientific constitution is yet to come, and which are still abandoned 

 to the uncertainties of vague and popular discussion. Although 

 several other sciences have emerged from this state at a compara- 

 tively recent date, none now remain in it except those which relate 

 to man himself, the most complex and most difficult subject of 

 study on which the human mind can be engaged. 1 . . . 



1 Mill was mistaken. He was thinking of the study of human mind and society 

 in terms of causation. But already Darwin had published his view of the origin 

 of species, and Wallace his famous companion essay. Stimulated by them. 



