216 INDUCTION. 



sailed round. Kepler did not put what he had conceived into the facts, 

 but saw it in them. A conception implies, and corresponds to, something 

 conceived: and though the conception itself is not in the facts, but in our 

 mind, yet if it is to convey any knowledge relating to them, it must be a con- 

 ception of something which really is in the facts, some property which they 

 actually possess, and which they would manifest to our senses, if our senses 

 were able to take cognizance of it. If, for instance, the planet left behind 

 it in space a visible track, and if the observer were in a fixed position at 

 such a distance from the plane of the orbit as would enable him to see the 

 whole of it at once, he would see it to be an ellipse ; and if gifted with ap- 

 propriate instruments and powers of locomotion, he could prove it to be 

 such by measuring its different dimensions. Nay, further : if the track 

 were visible, and he were so placed that he could see all parts of it in suc- 

 cession, but not all of them at once, he might be able, by piecing together 

 his successive observations, to discover both that it was an ellipse and that 

 the planet moved in it. The case would then exactly resemble that of the 

 navigator who discovers the land to be an island by sailing round it. If 

 the path was visible, no one I think would dispute that to identify it with 

 an ellipse is to describe it : and I can not see why any difference should be 

 made by its not being directly an object of sense, when every point in it is 

 as exactly ascertained as if it were so. 



Subject to the indispensable condition which has just been stated, I do 

 not conceive that the part which conceptions have in the operation of 

 studying facts, has ever been overlooked or undervalued. No one ever dis- 

 puted that in order to reason about any thing we must have a conception 

 of it; or that when we include a multitude of things under a general ex- 

 pression, there is implied in the expression a conception of something com- 

 mon to those things. But it by no means follows that the conception is 

 necessarily pre-existent, or constructed by the mind out of its own mate- 

 rials. If the facts are rightly classed under the conception, it is because 

 there is in the facts themselves something of which the concej^tion is itself 

 a copy ; and which if w^e can not directly perceive, it is because of the lim- 

 ited power of our organs, and not because the thing itself is not there. 

 The conception itself is often obtained by abstraction from the very facts 

 which, in Dr. Whewell's language, it is afterward called in to connect. 

 This he himself admits, when he observes (which he does on several occa- 

 sions), how great a service would be rendered to the science of physiology 

 by the philosopher " who should establish a precise, tenable, and consistent 

 conception of life."* Such a conception can only be abstracted from the 

 phenomena of life itself ; from the very facts which it is put in requisition 

 to connect. In other cases, no doubt, instead of collecting the conception 

 from the very phenomena which we are attempting to colligate, we select 

 it from among those which have been previously collected by abstraction 

 from other facts. In the instance of -Kepler's laws, the latter Avas the 

 case. The facts being out of the reach of being observed, in any such 

 manner as would have enabled the senses to identify directly the path of 

 the planet, the conception requisite for framing a general description of 

 that path could not be collected by abstraction from the observations 

 themselves ; the mind had to supply hypothetically, from among the con- 

 ceptions it had obtained from other poi-tions of its experience, some one 

 which would correctly represent the series of the observed facts. It had 



* Novum Organum Renovatum, p, 32. 



