* Rationale of Political Representation, p. 34.
A general election is an induction of the intelligence of the country represented by the members of Parliament. The difference between democracy and monarchy is in one sense an affair of logic. Where electors are limited in franchise, and candidates restricted by property qualification, the induction is partial, but where all can vote and many can be chosen from, the premises are more capacious and the inference sounder.
Dr. Whately says, that 'in Natural Philosophy a single instance is often accounted a sufficient induction; e.g., having once ascertained that an individual magnet will attract iron, we are authorised to conclude that this property is universal.'
'The Edinburgh Reviewer of Whewell's "History of the Inductive Sciences," observes that, "by the accidental placing of a rhomb of calcareous spar, upon a book or line, Bartholinus discovered the property of the double refraction of light. By accidentally combining two rhombs in different positions, Huygens discovered the polarisation of light. By accidentally looking through a prism of the same substance, and turning it round, Mains discovered the polarisation of light by reflection; and by placing thin chrystalline films between two similar prisms or rhombs, M. Arago discovered the phenomena of polarised tints."
'To this Mr. Whewell, in his "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," makes the following reply:—"But Bartholinus could have seen no such consequence in the accident, if he had not previously had a clear conception of single refraction. A lady, in describing an optical experiment which had been shown her, said of her teacher, 'he told me to increase and diminish the angle of refraction: and, at last, I found that he only meant me to move my head up and down.' At any rate, till the lady had acquired a knowledge of the meaning which the technical terms convey, she could not have made Bartholinus's discovery by means of this accident. Suppose that Huygens made the experiment alluded to, without design, what he really observed was that the images appeared and disappeared alternately as he turned the rhomb round. His success depended on his clearness of thought, which enabled him to perform the intellectual analysis which would never have occurred to most men, however often they had combined two rhombs in different positions. Malus saw that in some positions the light reflected from the windows of the Louvre became dim. Another person would have attributed this to accident; he, however, considered the position of the prism, and the window; repeated the experiment often; and by virtue of the eminently distinct conceptions of space which he possessed, resolved the phenomenon into its geometrical conditions."* "If it were true, that the fall of an apple was the occasion of Newton's pursuing that train of thought which led to the doctrine of universal gravitation, the habits and constitution of Newton's intellect were the real source of this great event in the progress of knowledge."** "In whatever manner facts may be presented to the notice of a discoverer, they can never become the materials of exact knowledge, except they find his mind already provided with precise and suitable conceptions, by which they may be analysed and connected."'***
* Whewell: Phil. Induct. Sciences, vol. 2. pp. 199-1.
** Ibid, vol. 2, p. 189.
*** See J. N. Bailey's Essays pp. 87-8-9.
These admissions seem to me to prove that whenever a casual fact proves to us a new truth, it does so by its coincidence with previously known facts, and that the novelty of the occasion attracts all credit to itself, and we lose sight of the generalisation below—the fruitful soil of experience on which the new fact, like a seed, falls. We only recognise difference by comparison, and the comparison is an induction, however slender.
Monsieur de Montmorine was recaptured and brought to the scaffold, through the trifling circumstance of some chicken bones being found near the door of his landlady—a woman too poor to indulge in such dainties.* The discovery of de Montmorine was not, as at first sight appears, an inference from a single fact, but from an adjacent induction. It was a general truth, (known to the party who observed the bones) a truth inducted from a number of facts that poor people could not afford to luxuriate on chickens. It was, therefore, from this induction, inferred that some one of superior fortune must be living in that particular place.
* Chambers' Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts,
No. 61: the Story of Lavaiette, p. 27
The judicious care which the great fathers of science have exhibited in making their inferences, incontestably establishes their conviction of the danger of any other reasoning than that from inductions. Lord Brougham informs us, that what Newton's Principia is to science, Locke's essay to metaphysics, Demosthenes in oratory, and Homer in poetry, Cuvier's researches to our fossil osteology. But Cuvier never attempted to draw any inferences until he had examined the whole osteology of the living species.