16 
physical science suggests. ‘This science professes to glory 
in the Inductive Method. I seek to humble, and, indeed, 
righteously to discredit it, in so far as it is overweening and 
incorrect, by showing that in these places it has failed to com- 
prehend and to obey its own professed methcd. If the real 
nature of inductive demonstration can be evinced,—if it can be 
proved that its method is, indeed, far different from the one 
so often usurped by rash physical speculations, that it is more 
difficult and farmore rigid in its requirements,—then the wings 
of so-called physical science will be clipped ; its flight will be 
restrained within more safe and wholesome limits ; science will 
itself be a gainer in accuracy and solidity ; and the apparent 
collisions between science and revelation will all disappear, as 
it is shown that they lie only in these regions of illicit flight, 
from which science should have been restrained by her own 
logical methods. 
It would be instructive to trace the history of the discus- 
sions and definitions as to what induction is. We should find 
the professed modern followers of Lord Bacon, while con- 
ceding to Aristotle the honour of formulating the syllogism, 
claiming that induction is a different anda more fruitful mode 
of proving general truths, whose description the world owes 
to the great Englishman. We should find Aristotle’s sup- 
porters, as Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Grote, Whately, Hamilton, 
asserting that he also taught the nature of induction, and that 
in the syllogistic form. We should find each author, whether 
Baconian or Peripatetic, differing from every other as to 
what inductive proof really is. This will be sufficiently 
evinced by citations from the last two logicians named; for 
they show us the state of the theory after all the preceding 
agitations of it,—after the best consideration of a Newton and 
a Whewell. 
According to Hamilton, inductive proof proceeds thus, in 
form of syllogism :— 
Major.—This, that, and the other magnet attract iron. 
Minor.—But this, that, and the other magnet represent all 
magnets. 
Conclusion.— -. All magnets attract iron. 
To this Whately justly objects that the second proposition 
is manifestly and always unproven. It is vain to attempt to 
superinduce a syllogistic form upon a mental process, at the 
cost of introducing, as a premise, a proposition which must 
regularly and necessarily be without proof. Whately pro- 
poses this, then, as the more correct form :— 
Major—What belongs to the observed magnets belongs to 
all magnets. 
