Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1842 edition. Excerpt: ... the process induction; we call the established fact an induction, as, for instance, the fact widely collected analogies, (e. g. as in Paley's Natural Theology, ) in order to place some consequent assertion beyond the possibility of disbelief, or of reasonable doubt, the general assertion or inductive fact being also called an induction. Mr. Whewell says, (Mechanical Euclid, page 173, ) "that in this process some notion is superinduced upon the observed facts." I am not quite sure whether, by this, I am to understand the first interpretation we give to the facts, and which leads to experiment, or to the collecting of analogical facts, in order to confirm it, or set it aside, --and whether he calls this an induction: Or, whether he means, as I do, the application of that enlarged knowledge which is the consequence of experiment, or of collected analogical facts, to the unexperimented, or uncollected phenomena that always remain. I must also confess I have some difficulty with the answer he makes to the following question, in the first volume of the History of the Inductive Sciences: (Chap. III., Sect. 2, 2, page 79, ) "What was the radical and fatal defect in the speculations of the Greek philosophical schools?" The answer given is this: "That defect was, that though they had in their possession that z, y &c, s, are bitter. Such a tact, be it observed, is always different from a constituted general fact: it is a constituted general fact, after experiment, that z, y &c., are bitter, or that a number of stones, z, y Sec, have always fallen to the ground after being raised from it, and left without support; and such a general fact, after having admitted the particulars, we are not said to believe, but necessarily to admit: but the..."
