XXVI.] CHARACTER OF THE EXPERIMENTALIST. 579 



occasionally even a wiidness and vagueness in his notions, 

 which in a less careful experimentalist would have been 

 i'atal to the attainment of truth. This is especially apparent 

 in a curious paper concerning Eay-vibrations ; but fortu- 

 nately Faraday was aware of the shadowy character of his 

 speculations, and expressed the feeling in words which 

 must be quoted. " I think it likely," he says,^ " that I 

 have made many mistakes in the preceding pages, for 

 even to myself my ideas on this point appear only as the 

 shadow of a speculation, or as one of those impressions 

 upon the mind, which are allowable for a time as guides to 

 thought and research. He who labours in experimental 

 inquiries knows how numerous these are, and how often 

 their apparent fitness and beauty vanish before the progress 

 and development of real natural trutli." If, then, the ex- 

 perimentalist has no royal road to the discovery of the 

 truth, it is an interesting matter to consider by what logical 

 procedure he attains the truth. 



If I have taken a correct view of logical method, there 

 is really no sucli thing as a distinct process of induction. 

 The probability is infinitely small that a collection of 

 complicated facts will fall into an arrangement capable 

 of exhibiting directly the laws obeyed by them. The 

 mathematician might as well expect to integrate his 

 functions by a ballot-box, as the experimentalist to draw 

 deep truths from haphazard trials. All induction is but 

 the inverse application of deduction, and it is by the 

 inexplicable action of a gifted mind that a multitude of 

 hetero^reneous facts are ranged in luminous order as the 

 results of some uniformly acting law. So different, indeed, 

 are the qualities of mind required in different branches of 

 science, that it would be absurd to attempt to give an 

 exhaustive description of the character of mind which 

 leads to discovery. The labours of Newton could not 

 have been accomplished except by a mind of the utmost 

 mathematical genius ; Faraday, on the other hand, has 

 made the most extensive additions to human knowledge 

 without passing Ijeyond common arithmetic. I do not 

 remember meeting in Faraday's writings with a single 



^ Experimental Researches in Chemistnj and Physics, p. 372. 

 Philosophical Magazine, 3rd Series, May 1846, vol. xxviii. p. 350. 



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