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Updated: June 13, 2025
Whewell says that the ancients, or the school-men, or any modern inquirers, missed discovering the real law of a phenomenon because they applied to it an inappropriate instead of an appropriate conception; he can only mean that in comparing various instances of the phenomenon, to ascertain in what those instances agreed, they missed the important points of agreement; and fastened upon such as were either imaginary, and not agreements at all, or, if real agreements, were comparatively trifling, and had no connection with the phenomenon, the law of which was sought.
By HENRY ALFORD, M.A., Vicar of Wymeswold, and late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A HISTORY of the INDUCTIVE SCIENCES, from the Earliest Times to the Present. By the Rev. WILLIAM WHEWELL, B.D., F.R.S.; Pres. Geol. Society, and Professor of Casuistry in the University of Cambridge.
The controversies with Dr. Whewell, as well as much matter derived from Comte, were first introduced into the book in the course of the re-writing. At the end of 1841, the book being ready for the press, I offered it to Murray, who kept it until too late for publication that season, and then refused it, for reasons which could just as well have been given at first.
This is the tentative process which Dr. Whewell speaks of; and which has not unnaturally suggested the theory, that the conception is supplied by the mind itself; since the different conceptions which the mind successively tries, it either already possessed from its previous experience, or they were supplied to it in the first stage of the corresponding act of comparison; so that, in the subsequent part of the process, the conception manifested itself as something compared with the phenomena, not evolved from them.
Whewell, a very different type of mind, had 'Mansfield Park, I believe, read to him on his death-bed. And, indeed, up to the present date, some highly-cultured persons of my acquaintance take the same view. They may be very possibly right, but that is no reason why the people who have never read Miss Austen's novels and very few have should ape the fashion.
In the Nubeculæ, as Whewell insisted, "there coexist, in a limited compass and in indiscriminate position, stars, clusters of stars, nebulæ, regular and irregular, and nebulous streaks and patches. These, then, are different kinds of things in themselves, not merely different to us. There are such things as nebulæ side by side with stars and with clusters of stars.
Butler maintains that, by merely comparing appetite with conscience as springs of action, we see conscience is superior and ought to rule; and Whewell conceives this to be self-evident, and expresses it by stating that the Lower parts of our nature are to be governed by the Higher.
'I am for Dr Whewell myself; for I do not think that men and woman are worth being repeated in such countless worlds. There may be souls in other stars, but I doubt their having any bodies attached to them. But come, Mrs Bold, let us put our bonnets on and walk round the close.
Long after this, I applied to Sir Alexis, at the request of Dr. Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and through his interest an order was issued by the Russian Government for simultaneous observations to be made of the tides on every sea-coast of the empire. UNIVERSITY CLUB, Jan. 5, 1838.
Whewell received us in this room, standing on a rug before an open fireplace; a wood fire was burning cheerily. Mrs. Airy's daughter, a young girl, was with us. "Dr. Whewell shook hands with us, and we stood. I was very tired, but we continued to stand. In an American gentleman's house I should have asked if I might sit, and should have dropped upon a chair; here, of course, I continued to stand.
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