< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu
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151
PUNISHING A SENIOR WRANGLER.

motion and the law of gravitation are true; and that non-fulfillment of the prediction would not disprove the first law of motion, since the error might be in one or other of the three remaining assumptions. Similarly with the second law: the astronomical proof of it depends on the truth of the accompanying assumptions. So that the warrants for the assumptions A, B, C, and D, are respectively such that A, B, and C, being taken as trustworthy, prove the validity of D; D being thus proved valid, joins C, and B, in giving a character to A; and so throughout. The result is that every thing comes out right if they happen to be all true; but, if one of them is false, it may destroy the characters of the other three, though these are in reality exact. Clearly, then, astronomical prediction and observation can never test any one of the premises by itself. They can only justify the entire aggregate of premises, mathematical and physical, joined with the entire aggregate of reasoning processes leading from premises to conclusions.

I now recall the reviewer's "thought," uttered in his habitual manner, "that every tolerably educated man was aware that the proof of a scientific law consisted in showing that, by assuming its truth, we could explain the observed phenomena." Having from the point of view of ordinary logic dealt with this theory of proof as applied by the reviewer, I proceed to deal with it from the point of view of transcendental logic, as I have to charge the reviewer with either being ignorant of, or else deliberately ignoring, a cardinal doctrine of the System of Philosophy he professes to review—a doctrine set forth not in those four volumes of it which he seems never to have looked into, but in the one volume of it he has partially dealt with. For this principle which, in respect to scientific beliefs, he enunciates for my instruction, is one which, in "First Principles," I have enunciated in respect to all beliefs whatever. In the chapter on the "Data of Philosophy," where I have inquired into the legitimacy of our modes of procedure, and where I have pointed out that there are certain ultimate conceptions without which the intellect can no more stir "than the body can stir without help of its limbs," I have inquired how their validity or invalidity is to be shown; and I have gone on to reply that—

"Those of them which are vital, or cannot be severed from the rest without mental dissolution, must be assumed as true provisionally.... leaving the assumption of their unquestionableness to be justified by the results.
"§40, How is it to be justified by the results? As any other assumption is justified—by ascertaining that all the conclusions deducible from it correspond with the facts as directly observed—by showing the agreement between the experiences it leads us to anticipate and the actual experiences. There is no mode of establishing the validity of any belief, except that of showing its entire congruity with all other beliefs."

Proceeding avowedly and rigorously on this principle, I have next inquired what is the fundamental process of thought by which this con-

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