58 
Blaisdell—The Methods of Science, 
from the work of science, which in particular you have in like- 
manner concluded from circumstances yourself called upon to do. 
You did not take upon yourself the harness of preparatory 
training at haphazard or by mere knack or skill, nor did you 
blunder into it, nor did nature give it to you save as part of a 
reasonable procedure. You threw yourselves out on the prin¬ 
ciples of reason which bottoms all things and all inferential 
judgment, and were led by loyal logical inference to conclude 
that, as you were to do a particular work to which you had rea¬ 
soned as being yours to do, these were the forms of preparation 
for you to secure, and in the light of that same reason you 
entered upon them, measured them, shaped them. If logic had 
not instructed you to say your “Therefore,” you had wandered 
in a wilderness deeper than that the world, alas, would have 
been in without your science, and never would have found your 
way. The men of science may be unconscious of the mistress 
which guides them, though their hand, if they walk truly, is 
never out of her hand. 
B. What we usually call the distinctive methods of science 
are of two classes, which I will call severally the proximate and 
the ultimate methods, in both of which the true procedure is 
only fealty to logic. 
(a) You know well that it is the hardest part of scientific work 
to find the way into the presence of the facts which are the field of 
your science. Long and circuitous are the paths by which we 
enable ourselves to confront them. Take the facts of heredity or 
of the origin of species. By intermediate processes only do we 
look such facts in the face. If, for example, you suspect the 
existence of faculae across the whole disk of the sun, you put 
the question to the spectroheliograph, and in the report of the 
calcium lines H and K you find a witness you can trust in evi¬ 
dence of the fact you have suspicion of. You take the fact of 
gravitation as operating upon the earth directly as the mass 
and inversely as the square of the distance, and on the principle 
of analogy from this you calculate the orbits of a binary star, 
and on observation you find that the witness you trusted has en¬ 
abled you to conclude rightly. Professor Langley makes the 
bolometer his oracle, and is able by the same principle of analogy 
