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Updated: June 2, 2025
In general, Induction furnishes to science the laws of the elementary facts, from which, when known, those of the complex combinations are thought out deductively: specific observation of complex phaenomena yields no general laws, or only empirical ones; its scientific function is to verify the laws obtained by deduction.
They must, however, be connected deductively with the universal laws of human nature on which they rest, or they will be only low empirical laws. This is the text of the next two chapters.
The result of these considerations is only, in the first place, to point out a new source of inferiority in the Method of Agreement as compared with other modes of investigation, and new reasons for never resting contented with the results obtained by it, without attempting to confirm them either by the Method of Difference, or by connecting them deductively with some law or laws already ascertained by that superior method.
Again, we endeavoured to show deductively, that the contrasts of parts first seen in all unfolding embryos, are consequent upon the contrasted circumstances to which such parts are exposed; that thus, adaptation of constitution to conditions is the principle which determines their primary changes; and that, possibly, if we include under the formula hereditarily-transmitted adaptations, all subsequent differentiations may be similarly determined.
But as we can never be quite certain of this, the evidence derived from the Method of Residues is not complete unless we can obtain C artificially, and try it separately, or unless its agency, when once suggested, can be accounted for, and proved deductively from known laws. Even with these reservations, the Method of Residues is one of the most important among our instruments of discovery.
The false induction from genuine facts of observation, leading to the construction of theories which are then deductively applied in the face of the results of direct observation. The school of Broussais has furnished us with a good example of this error.
It is just as real as a realistic novel; but in order to make it so, its author, because he was working deductively, was not obliged to imitate the details of actual life which he had studied. "I have learned something in the world," he says to us: "Here is a fable that will make it clear to you."
"The conditions" to use a phase of Emerson's "are hard but equal": and at their best, the realist, working inductively, and the romantic, working deductively, are equally able to present the truth of fiction. The theory which follows in this chapter was first announced by the present writer in The Dial for November 16, 1904. Define the difference between realism and romance.
But, once adopted, they may be treated as, for practical purposes, unquestionable; men are concerned to apply them, not to substantiate them. In so far, men reason from them deductively and pass from the general rule to the particular instance.
Considering, then, as empirical laws only those observed uniformities respecting which the question whether they are laws of causation must remain undecided until they can be explained deductively, or until some means are found of applying the Method of Difference to the case, it has been shown in the preceding chapter that until a uniformity can, in one or the other of these modes, be taken out of the class of empirical laws, and brought either into that of laws of causation or of the demonstrated results of laws of causation, it can not with any assurance be pronounced true beyond the local and other limits within which it has been found so by actual observation.
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