SECTION 27. APPLICATION. 381 



needs, especially when the proposition is a comprehensive one, 

 is therefore manifest. To understand, accordingly, the prin- 

 ciples on which an instrument, a machine, a living body, or 

 an ideational complex is constructed, is to be in a position to 

 explain numerous facts which may otherwise each require a 

 separate explanation. 1 Hence with scientific advance it becomes 

 more and more appropriate to explain new facts by old facts 

 instead of seeking in each case for a particular and isolated 

 explanation. 



202. Generalisation and deduction form, then, essentially 

 one process, consisting in the systematic search for ordered 

 similarities, only that in the former connection the statement 

 reached is more comprehensive than the one which formed our 

 point of departure and that we do not necessarily start from 

 a definite statement, whereas in deduction we set out necessarily 

 with a definite statement and our conclusion has a narrower 

 basis than this statement has. Indeed, deduction, we perceive 

 now, is intimately related to generalisation, because to discover 

 the implications of a leading generalisation is tantamount to 

 discovering certain classes of facts in the course of the gener- 

 alising process. We might speak of deduction as inverted 

 generalisation. Both processes tend, by means of hypotheses, 

 to extend the field of truth. 



The need for verification (Conclusion 29) is, of course, im- 

 perative in deductive procedure, and general statements, in the 

 form of terse and luminous definitions, should be aimed at 

 here as in rounding off an inductive enquiry. (Conclusion 30.) 



SECTION XXVII. APPLICATION. 



CONCLUSION 32. 

 Need of Drawing Practical Deductions. 



203. In 2 we sought to establish that the whole of 

 existence forms a unity, and that the scientific process cannot 

 be therefore restricted to what are styled physical and abstract 

 truths. There we showed how comprehensive had become the 

 sphere of applied science, and how scientific workers have 

 from time immemorial consecrated part of their energies to 

 making life more tolerable through those identical means 

 whereby they extended the sphere of theoretical truth. 



In this Section we desire to advance a step beyond. We 

 wish to submit that the scientific process is also one, and that 

 accordingly it is only complete when fair attention has been 



1 For this reason Bacon never tired of extolling the importance of Forms 

 or natural laws. According to Alois Riehl, "Logik und Erkenntnistheorie", 

 in Systematische Philosophic, 1907, Galileo aimed, not at induction or deduc- 

 tion, but at establishing laws. 



