282 OWEN'S POSITION IN 



were solidly and securely laid sixty years ago. In 

 fact, the importance of the work done by that 

 time cannot be over-estimated ; for, as Cuvier 

 has somewhere said, whatever may become of 

 hypotheses, the man who has made a permanent 

 addition to our knowledge of facts, has rendered 

 an imperishable service to science. Nevertheless, 

 it is an equally profound truth, of which no one was 

 more conscious than Cuvier himself, that the 

 ascertainment of facts, in the narrowest sense of 

 the word, and the methodical recording of such 

 facts, though it is the beginning of scientific 

 righteousness, is only the beginning. To reach 

 the end, that which is common to groups of de- 

 tails must be carefully sifted out and expressed in 

 general propositions ; and these, again, must be 

 tentatively colligated by the guarded and re- 

 strained play of the imagination, in the invention 

 of hypotheses, susceptible of verification or nega- 

 tion by further observation. 



The vulgar antithesis of fact and theory is 

 founded on a misconception of the nature of 

 scientific theory, which is, or ought to be, no more 

 than the expression of fact in a general form. 

 Whatever goes beyond such expression is hypo- 

 thesis ; and hypotheses are not ends, but means. 

 They should be regarded as instruments by 

 which new lines of inquiry are indicated ; or by 

 the aid of which a provisional coherency and 

 intelligibility may be given to seemingly discon- 



