METHOD OF DISCOVERY. 63 



-slioe on the gravel outside. All these phenomena have 

 struck your attention instantly, and before two minutes 

 have passed you say, " Oh, somebody has broken open 

 the window, entered the room, and run off with the 

 spoons and the tea-pot !" That speech is out of your 

 mouth in a moment. And you will probably add, " I 

 know there has ; I am quite sure of it ! " You mean 

 to say exactly what you know; but in reality what 

 you have said has been the expression of what is, 

 in all essential particulars, a Hypothesis. You do 

 not know it at all ; it is nothing but a hypothesis 

 rapidly framed in your own mind ! And it is a 

 hypothesis founded on a long train of inductions and 

 deductions. 



What are those inductions and deductions, and how 

 have you got at this hypothesis ? You have observed, 

 in the first place, that the window is open ; but by a 

 train of reasoning involving many Inductions and 

 Deductions, you have probably arrived long before 

 at the General Law — and a very good one it is — 

 that windows do not open of themselves; and you 

 thei'efore conclude that something has opened the 

 window. A second general law that you have arrived 

 at in the same way is, that tea-pots and spoons do not 

 go out of a window spontaneously, and you are satisfied 

 that, as they are not now where you left them, 

 they have been removed. In the third place, you look 

 at the marks on the window-sill, and the shoe-marks 

 outside, and you say that in all previous experience 

 the former kind of mark has never been produced by 

 anything else but the hand of a human being ; and the 



