604 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



eralizations first, but in making thera without the aid or warrant of rigor- 

 ous inductive methods, and applying them deductively without the needful 

 use of that important part of the Deductive Method termed Verification. 



The order in which truths of the various degrees of generality should 

 be ascertained can not, I apprehend, be prescribed by any unbending rule. 

 I know of no maxim which can be laid down on the subject, but to obtain 

 those first in respect to which the conditions of a real induction can be 

 first and most completely realized. Now, wherever our means of investi- 

 gation can reach causes, without stopping at the empirical laws of the ef- 

 fects, the simplest cases, being those in which fewest causes are simulta- 

 neously concerned, will be most amenable to the inductive process ; and 

 these are the cases which elicit laws of the greatest comprehensiveness. 

 In every science, therefore, which has reached the stage at which it be- 

 comes a science of causes, it will be usual as well as desirable first to ob- 

 tain the highest generalizations, and then deduce the more special ones 

 from them. Nor can I discover any foundation for the Baconian maxim, 

 so much extolled by subsequent Avriters, except this : That before we at- 

 tempt to explain deductively from more general laws any new class of phe- 

 nomena, it is desirable to have gone as far as is practicable in ascertaining 

 the empirical laws of those phenomena; so as to compare the results of 

 deduction, not with one individual instance after another, but with general 

 propositions expressive of the points of agreement which have been found 

 among many instances. For if Newton had been obliged to verify the 

 theory of gravitation, not by deducing from it Kepler's laws, but by de- 

 ducing all the observed planetary positions which had served Kepler to 

 establish those laws, the Newtonian theory would probably never have 

 emerged from the state of an hypothesis.* 



The applicability of these remarks to the special case under considera- 

 tion can not admit of question. The science of the formation of character 

 is a science of causes. The subject is one to which those among the can- 

 ons of induction, by which laws of causation are ascertained, can be rigor- 

 ously applied. It is, therefore, both natural and advisable to ascertain the 

 simplest, which are necessarily the most general, laws of causation first, 

 and to deduce the middle pi-inciples from them. In other words, Etliolo- 

 gy, the deductive science, is a system of corollaries from Psychology, the 

 experimental science. 



§ 6. Of these, the earlier alone has been, as yet, really conceived or stud- 

 ied as a science ; the other, Ethology, is still to be created. But its cre- 

 ation has at length become practicable. The empirical laws, destin&d to 

 verify its deductions, have been formed in abundance by every successive 



* "To which," says Dr. Whewell, "we may add, that it is certain, from the history of the 

 subject, that in that case the hypothesis would never have been framed at all." 



Dr. Whewell (Philcsophy of Discovery, pp. 277-282) defends Bacon's rule against the pre- 

 ceding strictures. But his defense consists only in asserting and exemplifying a proposition 

 which I had myself stated, viz., that though the largest generalizations may be the earliest 

 made, .they are not at first seen in their entire generality, but acquire it by degrees, as they are 

 found to explain one class after another of phenomena. The laws of motion, for example, 

 were not known to extend to the celestial regions, until the motions of the celestial bodies 

 had been deduced from them. This, however, does not in any way affect the fact, that the 

 middle principles of astronomy, the central force, for example, and the law of the inverse 

 square, could not have been discovered, if the laws of motion, which are so much more uni- 

 versal, had not been known first. On Bacon's system of step-by-step generalization, it would 

 be impossible in any science to ascend higher than the empirical laws ; a remark which Dr. 

 Whewell's own Inductive Tables, referred to by him in support of his argument, ami)ly bear out*. 



