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Updated: June 3, 2025
A dynamic theory would begin by assuming that all history, terrestrial or cosmic, mechanical or intellectual, would be reducible to this formula if we knew the facts.
The particles are among all nations applied with so great latitude, that they are not easily reducible under any regular scheme of explication: this difficulty is not less, nor perhaps greater, in English, than in other languages.
Hence, then, the fact, that all exact science is reducible, by an ultimate analysis, to results measured in equal units of linear extension. Still it remains to be noticed in what manner this determination of equality by comparison of linear magnitudes originated. Once more may we perceive that surrounding natural objects supplied the needful lessons.
Then, comparing all existing theories with each other, and extracting from them that which is common to them all, I endeavored to discover that element in the idea of property which is necessary, immutable, and absolute; and asserted, after authentic verification, that this idea is reducible to that of INDIVIDUAL AND TRANSMISSIBLE POSSESSION; SUSCEPTIBLE OF EXCHANGE, BUT NOT OF ALIENATION; FOUNDED ON LABOR, AND NOT ON FICTITIOUS OCCUPANCY, OR IDLE CAPRICE. I said, further, that this idea was the result of our revolutionary movements, the culminating point towards which all opinions, gradually divesting themselves of their contradictory elements, converge.
It is an opportunity of directing the efforts of a large number of other men. Apart from the case of craftsmanship and artistic production, all the higher industrial efforts are reducible to a control of others, and can be made only by men who have the means of controlling them.
But, as the analogous argument against the syllogism was invalidated by applying equally as against all reasoning, which must be reducible to syllogism, so this also falls by its own generality, since, if true against these methods, it must be true against all observation and experiment, since these must ever proceed by one of the four.
Whichever view we may adopt, it still remains established that any invention is reducible, directly or indirectly, to a particular, determinate need, and that to allow man a special instinct, the definite specific character of which should be stimulation to creative activity, is a fantastic notion.
Now, by pursuing this sort of comparison, naturalists have arrived at the conviction that there are, some think five, and some seven, but certainly not more than the latter number and perhaps it is simpler to assume five distinct plans or constructions in the whole of the animal world; and that the hundreds of thousands of species of creatures on the surface of the earth, are all reducible to those five, or, at most, seven, plans of organization.
Whewell’s argument, if good at all, is good against all inferences from experience. In saying that no discoveries were ever made by the Four Methods, he affirms that none were ever made by observation and experiment; for assuredly if any were, it was by processes reducible to one or other of those methods.
It was not a march, it was a battle; a battle without rest and without end and without mercy; a battle with an Enemy whose power was beyond all estimate and whose movements were not reducible to any known law.
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