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I only think him mistaken in setting up this kind of operation, which according to the old and received meaning of the term, is not induction at all, as the type of induction generally; and laying down, throughout his work, as principles of induction, the principles of mere colligation. Dr.
The assertion that the planets move in ellipses, was but a mode of representing observed facts; it was but a colligation; while the assertion that they are drawn, or tend, towards the sun, was the statement of a new fact, inferred by induction. But the induction, once made, accomplishes the purposes of colligation likewise.
In every way, therefore, it is evident that to explain induction as the colligation of facts by means of appropriate conceptions, that is, conceptions which will really express them, is to confound mere description of the observed facts with inference from those facts, and ascribe to the latter what is a characteristic property of the former.
On the present occasion we have chiefly to distinguish this process of Colligation from Induction properly so called: and that the distinction may be made clearer, it is well to advert to a curious and interesting remark, which is as strikingly true of the former operation, as it appears to me unequivocally false of the latter.
Whewell calls the process Colligation of Facts by appropriate Conceptions, and affirms it to be the whole of Induction. But this also is only description, being really the ordinary process of ascertaining resemblance by a comparison of phenomena; and, though subsidiary to Induction, it is not itself Induction at all.
Dr. Whewell’s remark, therefore, is philosophically correct. Successive expressions for the colligation of observed facts, or, in other words, successive descriptions of a phenomenon as a whole, which has been observed only in parts, may, though conflicting, be all correct as far as they go. But it would surely be absurd to assert this of conflicting inductions.
But seeing that the multitudinous facts far surpass our powers of complete colligation, that much in the vital process is still obscure, that we are conscious in ourselves of a power of shaping circumstances which we are inclined in various degrees to attribute to other living things, so far we recognize a profound difference between the laws of life and the laws of physics, and pay our respects to M. Bergson and his allies of the neo-vitalist school.
There is, however, between Colligation and Induction, a real correlation, which it is important to conceive correctly. Colligation is not always induction; but induction is always colligation.
We conclude that the remaining effects, the places which have not been observed, agree in the same circumstance, and that the law of the motion of the earth is motion in an ellipse. The Colligation of Facts, therefore, by means of hypotheses, or, as Dr.
Whewell’s term Colligation, or the more general phrases, “mode of representing, or of expressing, phenomena:” provided it be clearly seen that the process is not Induction, but something radically different. What more may usefully be said on the subject of Colligation, or of the correlative expression invented by Dr. Of The Ground Of Induction.
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