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But this hypothesis, equally unphilosophical and irreligious, is not and never has been maintained by the great body of Inductive inquirers, who see no contradiction either between the established order of Nature and the supposition of its Divine origin, or between the operation of natural laws and the recognition of a supreme, superintending Providence.
While Galileo was on the brink of his great telescopic discoveries, Bacon was publishing doubts as to the utility of instruments in scientific investigations. To ascribe the inductive method to him is to ignore history. His fanciful philosophical suggestions have never been of the slightest practical use. No one has ever thought of employing them.
Whether as Father Tyrrell's own, or as assimilated by other minds, they belong, at least, to the free movement of experimental and inductive thought, which, in religion as in science, is ever the victorious movement, however fragmentary and inconclusive it may seem at any given moment to be.
The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause; some antecedent, on the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent.
At Ashpound the desolation was subjective and inductive, a plague-spot within; and although the flush of decay was visible, Gervase would struggle against it to the last.
The recognition, therefore, of any such law of proportionality, is superseded by the more comprehensive principle, in which as much of it as is true is implicitly asserted. The general remarks on causation, which seemed necessary as an introduction to the theory of the inductive process, may here terminate. That process is essentially an inquiry into cases of causation.
Deductive reasoning was Plato's method that of the poet or great artist, who worships not what he sees but the unseen perfect form behind; inductive reasoning was Aristotle's method that of the ordinary man, who respects what he sees that he may by patience find out what is the unseen class to which it belongs.
He therefore needs a test of inductive proof; and in assigning none, he seems to give up as impracticable the main problem of Logic properly so called.
It was this feeling which led William Blake to exclaim in his impulsive way, that to generalize is to be an idiot, that direct perception is all, and the slow process of the inductive reason a devil's machination. This method of intuition is to the more sober method of science as the romantic to the classical spirit in literature, permitting to the individual mind a licence of noble vagrancy.
It is hardly necessary to add, that when the inductive inference is of any but the most direct and obvious nature—when it requires several observations or experiments, in varying circumstances, and the comparison of one of these with another—it is impossible to proceed a step, without the artificial memory which words bestow.
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