112 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIII. No. 314 



places for such an institution are New York and Washington. 

 With regard to the. former, Columbia College has excellent facili- 

 ties for supplying the need ; but in Mr. White's opinion "the ma- 

 jority of its trustees have long since proved themselves blind to their 

 opportunities." Hence, in a second paper in the February number, 

 he favors the founding of a new university at the national capital, 

 which he thinks the best place in the country for ihe purpose. The 

 advantages offered by Washington consist partly in the number of 

 able and learned men resident there, whom the university could 

 employ as lecturers or teachers, but still more in the libraries 

 already established in the city, containing over a million volumes, 

 and in the extensive laboratories and other means of investigation 

 maintained by the government. Mr. White believes, that, if the 

 necessary funds could be obtained, a university could be established 

 at Washington which would not only have a powerful influence on 

 the higher education of the country, but would help to raise the 

 tone of political life at the national capital. As to this latter point' 

 however, the question arises whether the politicians would not be 

 more likely to exercise a deleterious influence on the students. 

 Besides this article by Mr. White, the February Foruin contains 

 ten other papers on a great variety of subjects. Mr. W. F. Lilly 

 has one on " The Foundation of Ethics," in which he takes strong 

 ground against the evolutionary theory of ethics as taught by Her- 

 bert Spencer, maintaining that it is not only false, but practically 

 pernicious, and that it is already exercising a baneful influence on 

 moral conduct in art, journalism, politics, and other departments of 

 action. What its effects and tendencies are, he promises to state 

 more fully in succeeding articles. Judge Alfred C. Coxe has an 

 important paper on " Relief for the Supreme Court." He alludes 

 to the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States is three or 

 four years behind its docket, and then suggests that the court 

 might catch up with its work if the judges were relieved from cir- 

 cuit duty, which would enable them to sit at Washington two 

 months longer than they do now, and if the practice of reading 

 opinions, which now occupies one day in each week, was aban- 

 doned. The other articles we have not space to notice. The 

 Forum has taken its place as the foremost magazine for general 

 discussion in the country ; but it seems to us, that, if some of the 

 papers it prints were longer and more elaborate, its usefulness 

 would be enhanced. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



*,,*Correspondevts are requested to be as brief as possible, Tlie luritcr's name i^ 

 in. all cases required as proof of g:ood faith. 



Twenty copies of the number containing his communication mill be furnished 

 free to any correspondent on reqicest. 



The Baconian Method in Science. 



In the nineteenth aphorism of his " Novum Organum," which 

 forms the second part of his " Instauratio Magno," Lord Bacon 

 observes that there are two possible methods for investigating and 

 discovering truth. The one, he says, flies at once from particular 

 observations to axioms. of the broadest generality, and from these 

 principles and their immutable verity it scrutinizes and discovers 

 its mediatory axioms or propositions leading to subordinate truths. 

 The other method from particular observations calls forth axioms 

 in a continuous and gradual ascent, so as at last to attain truths of 

 the broadest generality. The former of these methods, he says, is 

 the one in use ; the other is new and untried. 



The former method is familiarly known as the deductive method. 

 This movement of thought was thoroughly studied and expounded 

 by Aristotle, and is well understood. Lord Bacon opposed his 

 " new and untried " method to the old in this specific feature, that 

 the old or deductive method moved characteristically from the 

 general to the more specific, whereas his new method proceeded 

 from the particular, and advanced, step by step, to the general. 

 Obviously this new movement of his is simply what is known in 

 recent logical science as generalization, — the amplification of a 

 subject-notion or concept. It does not appear from Lord Bacon's 

 writings that he concerned himself at all about the special differ- 

 ences between logical generalization and logical induction. He 

 only insisted that scientific study should in the future unite the two 

 methods, — the old, which moved from the general to the particu- 

 lar, with the new, which moves from the particular to the general. 



Nor does he appear ever to distinguish the movement of thought 

 in proper generalization, which confines itself to the subject-notion, 

 from that known in logic as determination, which is the amplifica- 

 tion of the attribute-notion ; just as the old method did not dis- 

 tinguish between the two movements in the reduction of a concept 

 or notion, — between division, which was applied to subject-notions, 

 and partition, which was applied to attribute-notions. 



These movements of thought are fundamental movements, and 

 differ widely from one another in their respective natures and their 

 governing laws. It is as important for the facile and successful 

 prosecution of scientific study in any field of knowledge that they 

 be familiarly known, and be reduced to ready use, as it is for the 

 successful prosecution of mathematical studies that the fundamen- 

 tal or ground rules of arithmetic be mastered for accurate, and, as 

 it were, instinctive application whenever needful. Popular dis- 

 course may, perhaps, be pardoned for some looseness in the use of 

 the technical terms and phrases of science ; but discussion pro- 

 fessedly scientific, and claiming for itself something of the certitude 

 of genuine knowledge, should not ignore these ground rules of 

 scientific knowledge, nor confound them one with another. Widely 

 as they differ, they are alike serviceable for scientific uses ; they are 

 of equal validity ; they are equally intelligible in their essential na- 

 ture and in their applications. This is evident from the most cur- 

 sory exposition. 



All complete thought is quantitative. This attribute is revealed 

 among the most fundamental properties of thought. But in quan- 

 tity, which is but the attribute otherwise known as that of 

 "whole and parts," as we conceive of an object quantitatively 

 when we conceive of it as a whole having parts, extensive or 

 intensive — in quantity there are three, and only three, conceiv- 

 able relationships of the highest or most generic order ; viz., (l) 

 that of whole to part, (2) that of part to whole, and (3) that of part 

 to part. There are, accordingly, only three corresponding move- 

 ments of thought possible in this relationship : (1) deduction, (2) 

 generalization, and (3) induction. We pass over here the distinc- 

 tions already indicated as required in accurate science to be made 

 on account of the diverse charcter of notions as subject-notions or 

 as attribute-notions, and use the famiUar designations of the differ- 

 ent movements. Deduction moves from whole to part ; generali- 

 zation, from part to whole; induction, from part to part. 



Notwithstanding this manifest, and to a large extent familiarly 

 recognized, distinction between these fundamental movements of 

 thought, there is a common loose or faulty use of the terms which 

 properly designate them that is greatly to be deprecated. Par- 

 ticularly is this o'oservable in the case of the term " induction " 

 and its paronymes. For example : " an inductive study of the 

 mind " or " of the Scriptures " is every now and then proposed, 

 when a true inductive study obviously could never have been in- 

 tended. And even among professedly scientific thinkers are to be 

 detected not infrequently the most shadowy and illusive or even 

 positively false notions of induction and inductive science. Modern 

 science boasts of itself as being characteristically and distinctively 

 inductive, while it would be difficult to find in its work any con- 

 scious recognition of the essential character of this fundamental 

 movement of thought. In truth, even logical science has but very 

 imperfectly apprehended it, although the most familiar movement 

 in every-day life. The child induces from one experience from 

 touching the flame what a repetition will cause, and confidently 

 expects to find in the next flower he plucks something of the figure 

 or color or fragrance that he has found in the one he has already 

 gathered. Moreover, the exact character of the movement was 

 scientifically grasped and indicated many centuries ago by the 

 father of logical science. He did not elaborate the exposition of 

 the inductive movement as he did that of the deductive move- 

 ment; but he exemplified it perfectly in the first book of his 

 "Prior Analytics," c. XXV. (Tauchnitz edition), where from "bile- 

 less" and " long-lived " being both attributes of "man," " horse,'' 

 etc., he infers that the presence of " bileless " involves that of 

 " long-lived." The principle, he says, is this : if any two attri- 

 butes as parts belong to the same whole, the existence of either 

 one in any case determines the existence of the other. We might 

 state it thus : from any part of a given whole we may infer or induce 

 any complementary part. LOGICUS. 



