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is now drawing to a close. I must cut off general explanations and will show by an example how I would treat a doubtful question of history. You will find a specimen of my logical procedure in such a case in the __ volume of Science, where I discuss the Age of Basil Valentine. But in that case, I reach what may be counted as a certainty. In order to illustrate Abduction under difficulties, I want a case where the evidence is extremely slight and where the testimonies are open to grave suspicion, so that we cannot make the most distant approach to certainty in any way. I can think of no question that will answer this purpose
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On five occasions in my life, and on five occasions only, I have had an opportunity of testing my Abductions about historical facts, by the fulfillment of my predictions in subsequent archeological or other discoveries; and on each one of those five occasions my conclusions which in every case ran counter to that of the highest authorities, turned out to be correct. The two last cases were these. Prof. Petrie published a history of Egypt in which he treated the first three dynasties as mythical. I was just about writing a history of science and in the first chapter I showed why those Dynasties including the name of Menes and other facts ought to be considered historical. Before my book was near completed Petrie himself found the tomb of Menes. Again a few years ago I wrote in the Nation, where there was no room for details that the Babylonians had high scientific genius and that there was reason to conjecture that Alexander sent home a Babylonian celestial globe dating from 2300 years B.C. Now the newest finds show that at that very date they were accomplished astronomers.
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better than the life of Pythagoras. Here I can only make a conjecture which I predict that future discoveries will confirm in its main features as far as those discoveries shall go. This theory will make no pretension to being knowledge, but only to being a good guess, which we may strongly and confidently hope will be confirmed. [Here let those go who have to go]
Almost all our information about Pythagoras comes from three writers who lived some five hundred years later. Just think what that means! Two of these three writers are known otherwise to be about as careless as any in that uncritical age. The third, who is the principal witness, is a superstitious romancer who sets forth supernatural narratives as simple historical
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fact. I mean Iamblichus. Moreover, as far as we can descry from what the modern histories of ancient philosophy say there is no prospect of any hypothesis about Pythagoras ever being brought to the test. What, then, are we to do? We must take the different statements which we find in different ancient writers, the earliest of whom lived a century later, as facts. I do not mean that what they say is fact but their saying so is a fact and we must seek some rational explanation of how these facts came to be as they are. One of my chief maxims in such work is that you must never content yourself with saying, this witness knew nothing about it and therefore I do not believe what he says, or what this witness says is utterly impossible.
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That is no way to search out these things. You must have some definite and rational theory of how the witness was led to assert the particular untruth he does assert,— supposing it to be untruth. You must take that hypothesis which best unifies all the facts,— the facts that such and such assertions have been made by such and such writers; and that is the best conjecture possible. That is as near the truth as it is possible at present to come.
The least uncertain date in the life of Pythagoras is that he went to Italy at the age of forty in the year 532 B.C. So says Cicero, who was a very careful man. Less precisely Aulus Gellius and Iamblichus say the