THE LUMINIFEROUS BTHEE. 91 



The utility of the Institute depends, in my opinion, on the 

 lo^^alty with which this principle is carried out. If it be true 

 that there is occasionally a tendency on the part of the votaries 

 of Science to regard scientific methods as the sole means of 

 arriving at truth, and to disregard what claims to be the 

 truth on the ground that that claim depends in good measure 

 on the exercise of the feelings and moral faculties, it is, I 

 think, no less true that there is occasionally a tendency on the 

 part of those whose chief attention has been devoted to 

 investigations of the latter class to attribute to their own 

 apprehension of their subject that infallibility which they 

 conceive to belong to the subject in itself; to summarily 

 reject what claims to be suppoi-ted by weighty scientific 

 evidence, of the force of which they themselves may be ill 

 able to judge, merely because it runs counter to the ideas 

 which they had been led to adopt on evidence of quite a 

 different nature. 



But truth cannot be self-contradictory ; and if there be con- 

 flict between conclusions obtained by methods of quite a 

 different nature, and each supposed by those who respectively 

 employ them to be sound, the fair thing evidently is to com- 

 pare, if possible, the two modes of deduction, so as to trace 

 the discrepancy in the conclusions to its origin, which must 

 necessarily be some unwarranted assumption, or false step of 

 reasoning, or, in the numerous cases in which the reasoning 

 is not demonstrative, but a balance of probability has to be 

 struck, in an exaggerated estimate of the probable evidence 

 in favour of one conclusion, and a depreciation of that in 

 favour of the opposite. 



But here a difficulty arises. It may very well happen that 

 a person Avho draws his conclusion in one way, by a method 

 similar to those which he is in the habit of employing in 

 other cases, may be ill qualified to judge of the evidence on 

 the strength of which another person draws a difterent con 

 elusion. In such cases the process which appears most 

 conducive to attainment of the truth appears to be to 

 compare notes in a friendly discussion, with the asistance, if 

 it may be, of other persons who have studied the subject, 

 and of whom some, perhaps, are more used to the employ- 

 ment of the one, some to that of the other, of the methods 

 alluded to. Each party may thus learn something from the 

 other, and thereby be enabled to form a sounder judgment 

 on the whole of the evidence. 



Opportunities for discussions of this kind are afibrded by 



