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Updated: May 26, 2025
The man who does so in every decision of life is he who lives by faith; and, whether we regard the inductions of reason, or the dictates of sacred truth, such a man is taught to expect an influence greater and more effectual still.
Moments when the maid becomes a wife, the wife a widow, the widow a re-married woman, by a simple, swift illumination of the fancy. Moments when, wrought upon by a single word a look an emphasis and rising inflection, all logical sequence is cast away, processes are lost inductions lead nowhere.
And it can not be pretended that to judge of an induction when found is perfectly easy, is a thing for which aids and instruments are superfluous; for erroneous inductions, false inferences from experience, are quite as common, on some subjects much commoner than true ones.
When we have occasion to extend these inductions, or their consequences, to cases in which the error would be appreciable—to lines of perceptible breadth or thickness, parallels which deviate sensibly from equidistance, and the like—we correct our conclusions, by combining with them a fresh set of propositions relating to the aberration; just as we also take in propositions relating to the physical or chemical properties of the material, if those properties happen to introduce any modification into the result; which they easily may, even with respect to figure and magnitude, as in the case, for instance, of expansion by heat.
And in the more plain belief we are also borne out by the more sound inductions of learning. To the Pelasgi, not yet arrived at the intellectual stage of philosophical contemplation, the most sensible objects of influence would be the most earnestly adored.
In the first place, a set of signs by which we reason without consciousness of their meaning, can be serviceable, at most, only in our deductive operations. In our direct inductions we can not for a moment dispense with a distinct mental image of the phenomena, since the whole operation turns on a perception of the particulars in which those phenomena agree and differ.
As the proposition in which it is embodied pretends to no other truth than what it may share with many other modes of representing the same facts, to be consistent with the facts is all it requires: it neither needs nor admits of proof; though it may serve to prove other things, inasmuch as, by placing the facts in mental connection with other facts, not previously seen to resemble them, it assimilates the case to another class of phenomena, concerning which real Inductions have already been made.
Henceforth disregarding the hysterical or unreasoning attempts to revert from bourgeois scepticism to mysticism as a safeguard against the moral and material crisis of the present time, attempts which make us think of those lascivious women who become pious bigots on growing old henceforth both partisans and adversaries of socialism are forced to recognize the fact that, like Christianity at the dissolution of the Roman world, Socialism constitutes the only force which restores the hope of a better future to the old and disintegrating human society a hope no longer begotten by a faith inspired by the unreasoning transports of sentiment, but born of rational confidence in the inductions of modern experimental science.
But the considerations more recently adduced remove the mystery, by showing, that even when the inductions themselves are obvious, there may be much difficulty in finding whether the particular case which is the subject of inquiry comes within them; and ample room for scientific ingenuity in so combining various inductions, as, by means of one within which the case evidently falls, to bring it within others in which it can not be directly seen to be included.
His object to gain the key to the interpretation of nature; his method to gain it, not by the means common to all previous schools of philosophy, by untested reasonings and imposing and high-sounding generalisations, but by a series and scale of rigorously verified inductions, starting from the lowest facts of experience to discoveries which should prove and realise themselves by leading deductively to practical results these, in one form or another, were the theme of his philosophical writings from the earliest sight of them that we gain.
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