Page:The Foundations of Science (1913).djvu/41

Rh states in the passage just quoted will remain irrefutable, if only this postulate be interpreted to meet the case. For the principle in question merely says that whatever entity it may be, bullet, or poison, or devil, that affects the organism, the disease is not that entity, but is the resulting alteration in the process of the organism.

I insist, then, that this principle of Virchow’s is no trial supposition, no scientific hypothesis in the narrower sense—capable of being submitted to precise empirical tests. It is, on the contrary, a very precious leading idea, a theoretical interpretation of phenomena, in the light of which observations are to be made—‘a regulative principle’ of research. It is equivalent to a resolution to search for those detailed connections which link the processes of disease to the normal process of the organism. Such a search undertakes to find the true unity, whatever that may prove to be, wherein the pathological and the normal processes are linked. Now without some such leading idea, the cellular pathology itself could never have been reached; because the empirical facts in question would never have been observed. Hence this principle of Virchow’s was indispensable to the growth of his science. Yet it was not a verifiable and not a refutable hypothesis. One value of unverifiable and irrefutable hypotheses of this type lies, then, in the sort of empirical inquiries which they initiate, inspire, organize and guide. In these inquiries hypotheses in the narrower sense, that is, trial propositions which are to be submitted to definite empirical control, are indeed everywhere present. And the use of the other sort of principles lies wholly in their application to experience. Yet without what I have just proposed to call the ‘leading ideas’ of a science, that is, its principles of an unverifiable and irrefutable character, suggested, but not to be finally tested, by experience, the hypotheses in the narrower sense would lack that guidance which, as M. Poincaré has shown, the larger ideas of science give to empirical investigation.

I have dwelt, no doubt, at too great length upon one aspect only of our author’s varied and well-balanced discussion of the