Page:The Foundations of Science (1913).djvu/37

Rh tral problem of the logic of science thus becomes the problem of the relation between the two fundamentally distinct types of hypotheses, i. e., between those which can not be verified or refuted through experience, and those which can be empirically tested.

The detailed treatment which M. Poincaré gives to the problem thus defined must be learned from his text. It is no part of my purpose to expound, to defend or to traverse any of his special conclusions regarding this matter. Yet I can not avoid observing that, while M. Poincaré strictly confines his illustrations and his expressions of opinion to those regions of science wherein, as special investigator, he is himself most at home, the issues which he thus raises regarding the logic of science are of even more critical importance and of more impressive interest when one applies M. Poincaré’s methods to the study of the concepts and presuppositions of the organic and of the historical and social sciences, than when one confines one’s attention, as our author here does, to the physical sciences. It belongs to the province of an introduction like the present to point out, however briefly and inadequately, that the significance of our author’s ideas extends far beyond the scope to which he chooses to confine their discussion.

The historical sciences, and in fact all those ‘sciences such as geology, and such as the evolutionary sciences in general, undertake theoretical constructions which relate to past time. Hypotheses relating to the more or less remote past stand, however, in a position which is very interesting from the point of view of the logic of science. Directly speaking, no such hypothesis is capable of confirmation or of refutation, because we can not return into the past to verify by our own experience what then happened. Yet indirectly, such hypotheses may lead to predictions of coming experience. These latter will be subject to control. Thus, Schliemann’s confidence that the legend of Troy had a definite historical foundation led to predictions regarding what certain excavations would reveal. In a sense somewhat different from that which filled Schliemann’s enthusiastic mind, these predictions proved verifiable. The result has been a considerable