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Rh cessfully followed in the discovery of objective truth, and the kind of evidence upon which it rests. We doubt if Dr. Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences could be appreciated by one who had not read the previous work on the History of those Sciences, or who had not at least a fair knowledge elsewhere gained of the Sciences themselves ; and this for the very patent reason, that the Philosophy as a contribution to Mental Science has been based on the History, to which it stands in the same relation, as the Laws of Gravitation do to observations and calculations of the Heavenly bodies.

Another common objection to the general study of Inductive Science, by those who admit the importance of Induction as a mental process is that the inductive faculty being one of advance to the unknown, is, like the inventive faculty, a gift, not an attainment, and that therefore it cannot be imparted by any teaching. We might perhaps demur even to this view of the matter, and while admitting that, like the æsthetic perceptions and faculties, it is the natural endowment of men in different degrees ; we might urge that like these perceptions it may be trained and strengthened, and that this is to be effected by means similar to those successfully pursued in other branches of education. Certainly inductive reasoning is not a rarer gift than a poetic imagination and power of expression, yet those who argue most stoutly against the teaching of the former, will be the first to urge the necessity of the general cultivation of the latter by the study of classic and modern literature. But this would be a very partial and imperfect view of the matter. The inductive process is a universal phenomenon of mental action ; and is practically performed by us in every hour of our lives, in so far as it consists in jumping from particulars to a general conclusion. That it is so is only not apparent because, in practical social life, almost every generalization is immediately followed by a deduction, and thus the first part of the process is lost sight of. The juryman who has to draw a conclusion from evidence, unconsciously supplies a major term to the syllogism by which he reasons out the bearing of the evidence on the guilt or innocence of the accused, and therein as truly exercises the inductive faculty, as does an Owen when he argues that a fossil skull must have been that of a Ruminant, because it bears a pair of horn-cores. The difference is, that the one has verified his induction in a very different degree to the other, and had the former not the advantage of the trained experience of the advocate and judge to guide him, it is not very difficult to conceive that he would make frequent grievous blunders on points of inference as well as of law, not because he has