Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/74

70 form every tenable hypothesis of its nature, cause or origin, and to give to each of these a due place in the inquiry. The investigator thus becomes the parent of a family of hypotheses; and by his paternal relations to all is morally forbidden to fasten his affections unduly upon any one. In the very nature of the case, the chief danger that springs from affection is counteracted. Where some of the hypotheses have been already proposed and used, while others are the investigator's own creation, a natural tendency to bias arises, but the right use of the method requires the impartial adoption of all into the working family. The investigator thus at the outset puts himself in cordial sympathy and in the parental relations of adoption, if not of authorship, with every hypothesis that is at all applicable to the case under investigation. Having thus neutralized, so far as may be, the partialities of his emotional nature, he proceeds with a certain natural and enforced erectness of mental attitude to the inquiry, knowing well that some of the family of hypotheses must needs perish in the ordeal of crucial research, but with a reasonable expectation that more than one of them may survive, since it often proves in the end that several agencies were conjoined in the production of the phenomenon. Honors must often be divided between hypotheses. In following a single hypothesis, the mind is biased by the presumptions of the method toward a single explanatory conception. But an adequate explanation often involves the coordination of several causes. This is especially true when the research deals with complicated phenomena such as prevail in the field of the earth-sciences. Not only do several agencies often participate, but their proportions and relative importance vary from instance to instance in the same class of phenomena. The true explanation is therefore necessarily multiple, and often involves an estimate of the measure of participation of each factor. For this the simultaneous use of a full staff of working hypotheses is demanded. The method of the single working hypothesis is here incompetent.

The reaction of one hypothesis upon another leads to a fuller and sharper recognition of the scope of each. Every added hypothesis is quite sure to call forth into clear recognition neglected aspects of the phenomena. The mutual conflicts of hypotheses whet the discriminative edge of each. The sharp competition of hypotheses provokes keenness in the analytic processes and acuteness in differentiating criteria. Fertility in investigative devices is a natural sequence. If therefore an ample group of hypotheses encompass the subject on all sides, the total outcome of observation, of discrimination and of recognition of significance and relationship is full and rich.

Closely allied to the method of multiple working hypotheses is

In many of the more complex problems of the earth-sciences the basal facts are but imperfectly determined, e. g., the rate of rise of