ALLEGED USES OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 



293 



of Creation? No, it must be before another tribunal 

 that this new philosophy is to be truly and righteously 

 judged. 



It is important that these sentences be not misunder- 

 stood. There is both a necessity for the ascertainment of 

 detached facts, that we may attain to the elimination of 

 principles, and a danger in premature generalization, as 

 tending to mislead men from the true road to that result. 

 But, on the other hand, scientific men are seen spending 

 their time in wrong pursuits, merely for want of the tra- 

 cings which are often supplied for their direction by hap- 

 py hypotheses. It is to the chilling repression of all sal- 

 iency in investigation, which characterizes the scien- 

 tific men of our country and age, that I object not to a 

 due caution in selecting proper paths in which to ven- 

 ture. The function of hypothesis in suggesting observa- 

 tions and experiments is admitted by one of the most vig- 

 orous thinkers of our time. " Without such assumptions, 

 science could never have attained its present state : they 

 are necessary steps in the progress to something more 

 certain. . . . The process of tracing regularity in any 

 complicated and at first sight confused set of appearances, 

 is necessarily tentative : we begin by making any suppo- 

 sition, even a false one, to see what consequences will 

 follow from it ; and by observing how these differ from 

 the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make 

 in our assumption. . . * Some fact,' says M. Comte, « is 

 as yet little understood, or some law is unknown : we 

 frame on the subject an hypothesis as accordant as possi- 

 ble with the whole of the data already possessed ; and the 

 science, being thus enabled to move forward freely, al- 

 ways ends by leading to new consequences capable of ob- 

 servation, which either confirm or refute, unequivocally, 

 the first supposition.' . . . Let any one watch the man- 

 ner in which he himself unravels any complicated 

 mass of evidence ; let him observe how, for instance, he 

 elicits the true history of any concurrence from the in- 

 volved statements of one or many witnesses ; he will find 

 that he does not take all the items of evidence into his 

 mind at once, and attempt to weave them together: the 

 human faculties are not equal to such an undertaking ; he 

 extemporizes, from a few of the particulars, a first rude 

 theory of the mode in which the facts took place, and then 

 looks a* the other statements one by one, to try whether 



