INDUCTIONS IMPROPERLY SO CALLED. 215 



concerning that mental process I fully agree, and would gladly transfer all 

 that portion of his book into my own pages. I only think him mistaken 

 in setting up this kind of operation, which according to the old and received 

 meaning of the term, is not induction at all, as the type of induction gener- 

 ally ; and laying down, throughout his work, as principles of induction, the 

 principles of mere colligation. 



Dr. Whewell maintains that the general proposition which binds togeth- 

 er the particular facts, and makes them, as it were, one fact, is not the mere 

 sum of those facts, but something more, since there is introduced a concep- 

 tion of the mind, which did not exist in the facts themselves. " The par- 

 ticular facts," says he,* "are not merely brought together, but there is a 

 new element added to the combination by the very act of thought by which 

 they are combined When the Greeks, after long observing the mo- 

 tions of the planets, saw that these motions might be rightly considered as 

 produced by the motion of one wheel revolving in the inside of another 

 wheel, these wheels were creations of their minds, added to the facts which 

 they perceived by sense. And even if the wheels were no longer supposed 

 to be material, but were reduced to mere geometrical spheres or circles, they 

 were not the less products of tho mind alone — something additional to the 

 facts observed. The same is the case in all other discoveries. The facts 

 are known, but they are insulated and unconnected, till the discoverer sup- 

 plies from his own store a principle of connection. The pearls are there, 

 but they will not hang together till some one provides the string." 



Let me first remark that Dr. Whewell, in this passage, blends together, 

 iudiscriminately, examples of both the processes which I am endeavoring 

 to distinguish from one another. When the Greeks abandoned the suppo- 

 sition that the planetary motions were produced by the revolution of mate- 

 rial wheels, and fell back upon the idea of " mere geometrical spheres or 

 circles," there was more in this change of opinion than the mere substitu- 

 tion of an ideal curve for a physical one. There was the abandonment of 

 a theory, and the replacement of it by a mere description. No one would 

 think of calling the doctrine of material wheels a mere description. That 

 doctrine was an attempt to point out the force by which the planets were 

 acted upon, and compelled to move in their orbits. But when, by a great 

 step in philosophy, the materiality of the wheels was discarded, and the ge- 

 ometrical forms alone retained, the attempt to account for the motions was 

 given up, and what was left of the theory was a mere description of the 

 orbits. The assertion that the planets were cari-ied round by wheels re- 

 volving in the inside of other wheels, gave place to the proposition, that 

 they moved in the same lines which would be traced by bodies so carried : 

 which was a mere mode of representing the sum of the observed facts ; as 

 Kepler's was another and a better mode of representing the same observa- 

 tions. 



It is true that for these simply descriptive operations, as v/ell as for the 

 erroneous inductive one, a concej^tion of the mind was required. The con- 

 ception of an ellipse must have presented itself to Kepler's mind, before he 

 could identify the planetary orbits with it. According to Dr. Whewell, 

 the conception was something added to the facts. He expresses himself 

 as if Kepler had put something into the facts by his mode of conceiving 

 them. But Kepler did no such thing. The ellipse was in the facts before 

 Kepler recognized it; just as the island was an island before it had been 



* Novum Organum Renovatum, pp. 72, 73. 



