Page:System of Logic.djvu/459

 shadow thrown upon the moon is circular; or this, that on the sea, or any extensive plain, our horizon is always a circle; either of which marks is incompatible with any other than a globular form. I assert further, that the earth is that particular kind of a globe which is termed an oblate spheroid; because it is found by measurement in the direction of the meridian, that the length on the surface of the earth which subtends a given angle at its centre, diminishes as we recede from the equator and approach the poles. But these propositions, that the earth is globular, and that it is an oblate spheroid, assert, each of them, an individual fact; in its own nature capable of being perceived by the senses when the requisite organs and the necessary position are supposed, and only not actually perceived because those organs and that position are wanting. This identification of the earth, first as a globe, and next as an oblate spheroid, which, if the fact could have been seen, would have been called a description of the figure of the earth, may without impropriety be so called when, instead of being seen, it is inferred. But we could not without impropriety call either of these assertions an induction from facts respecting the earth. They are not general propositions collected from particular facts, but particular facts deduced from general propositions. They are conclusions obtained deductively, from premises originating in induction: but of these premises some were not obtained by observation of the earth, nor had any peculiar reference to it.

If, then, the truth respecting the figure of the earth is not an induction, why should the truth respecting the figure of the earth's orbit be so? The two cases only differ in this, that the form of the orbit was not, like the form of the earth itself, deduced by ratiocination from facts which were marks of ellipticity, but was got at by boldly guessing that the path was an ellipse, and finding afterward, on examination, that the observations were in harmony with the hypothesis. According to Dr. Whewell, however, this process of guessing and verifying our guesses is not only induction, but the whole of induction: no other exposition can be given of that logical operation. That he is wrong in the latter assertion, the whole of the preceding book has, I hope, sufficiently proved; and that the process by which the ellipticity of the planetary orbits was ascertained, is not induction at all, was attempted to be shown in the second chapter of the same Book. We are now, however, prepared to go more into the heart of the matter than at that earlier period of our inquiry, and to show, not merely what the operation in question is not, but what it is.

§ 4. We observed, in the second chapter, that the proposition "the earth moves in an ellipse," so far as it only serves for the colligation or connecting together of actual observations (that is, as it only affirms that the observed positions of the earth may be correctly represented by as many points in the circumference of an imaginary ellipse), is not an induction, but a description: it is an induction, only when it affirms that the intermediate positions, of which there has been no direct observation, would be found to correspond to the remaining points of the same elliptic circumference. Now, though this real induction is one thing, and the description another, we are in a very different condition for making the induction before we have obtained the description, and after it. For inasmuch as the description, like all other descriptions, contains the assertion of a resem-