ENPages
181
O.New66
So the odds are more than a number written with fifty figures against—which means, "utterly overwhelming,"—that the right explanation of any given fact would not yet have entered the mind of man by chance, to say nothing of the labor of testing the hypotheses. I could show that, substituting for the above words "any given fact," the words any fact that could materially serve to give science a start, and modifying the odds accordingly, they would still remain utterly overwhelming; but really, the treatment of a fact of intelligence as a question of blind chance is too nonsensical for serious consideration.
For too many years Galileo's implied maxim that the "simplest" hypothesis
105
182
O.New67
should be preferred, recommended itself to me only as referring to logical simplicity, in spite of the fact that almost every advance in understanding natural phenomena shows them to be far more intricate than we had previously supposed. It was not until I had been forced to many a mental recantation that my mind at length opened to the true doctrine, that logical simplicity is a secondary,—and badly secondary,—consideration, and that the proper preference is, just as Galileo himself conceived it, for the hypothesis that is facile, natural, and satisfying to the human mind; and many tests concerning my own
102 103
183
O.New68
studies and concerning the researches of others, soon confirmed me in this opinion. Their array, when my logic-book comes out, will convince everybody. But no! I am forgetting those who are clad in an armour impenetrable to accurate thought. They may conceive my proposition to involve a denial of the laws of association, or of their rigidity. It would be no weaker than one can often hear. But if right, it follows at once that man has a divinatory power, primary or derived;—a power not, indeed, sufficient to make his first conjecture usually right, yet sufficient to make the number of wrong guesses, before the right one is hit upon, quite small.
115
184
O.69
In the Neglected Argument, I recognize the usual course of Retroduction by which scientific truths are first brought to light. When scientific hypotheses attain the highest degrees of plausibility, one can recognize in the confidence they excite, even in the minds of others than oneself, a peculiar quality; and the quality of the confidence the N.A. excites is indistinguishable from the quality of confidence that for example chemists had in the Daltonian theory fifty years ago, before it had received any inductive support. Undoubtedly it leaves its conclusion no more than
102 words 97
185
O.70
a hypothesis, which must be subjected to a critical examination consisting in Deduction followed by Induction. Nor could self-conceit go further than to undertake to deduce how the Creator,—even were He finite,—must behave. Could I so much as enter a room where two chess-players were contending for the "championship" of the world, as they call it, and presume to discern their reasons for their moves? Not I. Yet what are they? Men who prefer chess to mathematics!
109 words