386 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



lations which enable women, "not indeed to make scien- 

 tific discoveries, but to exercise the most momentous and 

 salutary influence over the method by which scientific dis- 

 coveries are made." For, as Buckle points out, men of 

 science are too inclined to employ the inductive method to 

 the exclusion of the deductive. 1 They have become slaves 

 to the tyranny of facts, and, as such, are incompetent to 

 further the progress of science as they would by using 

 both methods instead of one. And their slavery would be 

 still more complete and ignominious were it not for the 

 great though unconcious service to science rendered by 

 women who have kept alive the deductive habit of thought. 

 ' ' Their turn of thought, their habits of mind, their conver- 

 sation, their influence, insensibly extending over the whole 

 surface of society and frequently penetrating its intimate 

 structure, have, more than all other things put together, 

 tended to raise us up into an ideal world, lift us from the 

 dust in which we are too prone to grovel, and develop 

 in us those germs of imagination which even the most 

 sluggish and apathetic understandings in some degree 

 possess. ' ' 



From the foregoing observations it is manifest that the 

 best results to science are secured when men and women 

 work together men supplying the slow, logical reasoning 



i ' ' Induction is, indeed, a mighty weapon laid up in the armory 

 of the human mind, and by its aid great deeds have been accom- 

 plished and noble conquests have been won. But in that armory there 

 is another weapon, I will not say of stronger make, but certainly 

 of keener edge; and, if that weapon had been oftener used during 

 the present and preceding century, our knowledge would be far more 

 advanced than it actually is. If the imagination had been more 

 cultivated, if there had been a closer union between the spirit of 

 poetry and the spirit of science, natural philosophy would have made 

 greater progress, because natural philosophers would have taken a 

 higher and more successful aim, and would have enlisted on their 

 side a wider range of human sympathies. ' ; Buckle : The Influence 

 of Women on the Progress of Knowledge. 



