United States or Cocos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For there is probably no one even of the best established laws of causation which is not sometimes counteracted, and to which, therefore, apparent exceptions do not present themselves, which would have necessarily and justly shaken the confidence of mankind in the universality of those laws, if inductive processes founded on the universal law had not enabled us to refer those exceptions to the agency of counteracting causes, and thereby reconcile them with the law with which they apparently conflict.
Therefore, in the fist place, the true and only method, according to Comte, is the inductive, and all science is only such when it has experiment as its basis; in the second place, the goal and crown of sciences is formed by that new science dealing with the imaginary organism of humanity, or the super-organic being, humanity, and this newly devised science is sociology.
If such a suggestion were effectively impressed upon our subjective mind, then by the fundamental law of our nature our subjective mind would act in strict accordance with this suggestion, with the result that the objective mind would no longer be separated from it, and that we should carry with us into the unseen our whole mentality, both subjective and objective, and so be able to exercise our inductive powers of selection and initiative as well there as here.
This being admitted, it is seen that in the case in question that antecedent can be no other than A; but that if it be no other than A it must be A, is not proved, by these instances at least, but taken for granted. There is no need to spend time in proving that the same thing is true of the other Inductive Methods. The universality of the law of causation is assumed in them all.
It will be noted that the inductive method has not, in these pages, been honored by a due observance. It would have been easy to have treated the subject inductively, amassing facts and drawing conclusions, but to have done so the author would have been false to the very principle about which the work came into being.
The statement, that the uniformity of the course of nature is the ultimate major premiss in all cases of induction, may be thought to require some explanation. The immediate major premiss in every inductive argument, it certainly is not. Of that, Archbishop Whately’s must be held to be the correct account. But how come we by this major premiss?
The law of cause and effect, being thus certain, is capable of imparting its certainty to all other inductive propositions which can be deduced from it; and the narrower inductions may be regarded as receiving their ultimate sanction from that law, since there is no one of them which is not rendered more certain than it was before, when we are able to connect it with that larger induction, and to show that it can not be denied, consistently with the law that every thing which begins to exist has a cause.
But, thus transmuted, the inductive principle issues out of this metamorphose, a fiction not a truth; a weapon of air, which even in the hands of a giant can inflict no blow because it is itself a shadow. The object of assault receives the unsubstantial thrust without a shock, only exposing the want of solidity in the implement of war.
Buckle, the method of the philosophers, like the method of the theologians, was deductive, and not inductive; and this, he thinks, characterizes the operation of the intellect of Scotland in all departments.
The second part should deal with his entry into the world of books; into that account of a long series of collated experiments and partly verified hypotheses we call science; into the imperfectly developed system of inductive and deductive logic which determines mathematics and philosophy; into the long, inaccurate and largely unverifiable account of human blindness and error known as history; and into the realm of idealism, symbol, and pitiful pride we find in the story of poetry, letters, and religion.
Word Of The Day