The value of mathematical instruction as a preparation for those more difficult investigations, consists in the applicability not of its doctrines, but of its method. Mathematics will ever remain the most perfect type of the Deductive Method in general; and the applications of mathematics to the deductive branches of physics, furnish the only school in which philosophers can effectually learn the most difficult and important portion of their art, the employment of the laws of simpler phenomena for explaining and predicting those of the more complex. These grounds are quite sufficient for deeming mathematical training an indispensable basis of real scientific education, and regarding (according to the dictum which an old but unauthentic tradition ascribes to Plato) one who is ἀγεωμέτρητος, as wanting in one of the most essential qualifications for the successful cultivation of the higher branches of philosophy.
CHAPTER XXV.
OF THE GROUNDS OF DISBELIEF.
[§ 1.] The method of arriving at general truths, or general propositions fit to be believed, and the nature of the evidence on which they are grounded, have been discussed, as far as space and the writer's faculties permitted, in the twenty-four preceding chapters. But the result of the examination of evidence is not always belief, nor even suspension of judgment; it is sometimes disbelief. The philosophy, therefore, of induction and experimental inquiry is incomplete, unless the grounds not only of belief, but of disbelief, are treated of; and to this topic we shall devote one, and the final, chapter.
By disbelief is not here to be understood the mere absence of belief. The ground for abstaining from belief is simply the absence or insufficiency of proof; and in considering what is sufficient evidence to support any given conclusion, we have already, by implication, considered what evidence is not sufficient for the same purpose. By disbelief is here meant, not the state of mind in which we form no opinion concerning a subject, but that in which we are fully persuaded that some opinion is not true; insomuch that if evidence, even of great apparent strength, (whether grounded on the testimony of others or on our own supposed perceptions,) were produced in favour of the opinion, we should believe that the witnesses spoke falsely, or that they, or we ourselves if we were the direct percipients, were mistaken.
That there are such cases, no one is likely to dispute. Assertions for which there is abundant positive evidence are often disbelieved, on account of what is called their improbability, or impossibility. And the question for consideration is what, in the present case, these words mean, and how far and in what circumstances the properties which they express are sufficient grounds for disbelief.
[§ 2.] It is to be remarked in the first place, that the positive evidence produced in support of an assertion which is nevertheless rejected on the score of impossibility or improbability, is never such as amounts to full proof. It is always grounded on some approximate generalization. The fact may have been asserted by a hundred witnesses; but there are many exceptions to the universality of the generalization that what a hundred witnesses affirm is true. We may seem to ourselves to have actually seen the fact: but, that we really see what we think we see, is by no means an universal truth; our organs may have been in a morbid state; or we may have inferred something, and imagined that we perceived it. The evidence, then, in the affirmative being never more than an approximate generalization, all will depend on what the evidence in the negative is. If that also rests on an approximate generalization, it is a case for comparison of probabilities. If the approximate generalizations leading to the affirmative are, when added together, less strong, or in other words, farther from being universal, than the approximate generalizations which support the negative side of the question, the proposition is said to be improbable, and is to be disbelieved provisionally. If however an alleged fact be in contradiction, not to any number of approximate generalizations, but to a completed generalization grounded on a rigorous induction, it is said to be impossible, and is to be disbelieved totally.
This last principle, simple and evident as it appears, is the doctrine which, on the occasion of an attempt to apply it to the question of the credibility of miracles, excited so violent a controversy. Hume's celebrated doctrine, that nothing is credible which is contradictory to experience, or at variance with laws of nature, is merely this very plain and harmless proposition, that whatever is contradictory to a complete induction is incredible. That such a maxim as this should either be accounted a dangerous heresy, or mistaken for a great and recondite truth, speaks ill for the state of philosophical speculation on such subjects.
But does not (it may be asked) the very statement of the proposition imply a contradiction? An alleged fact, according to this theory, is not to be believed if it contradict a complete induction. But it is essential to the completeness of an induction that it shall not contradict any known fact. Is it not then a petitio principii to say, that the fact ought to be disbelieved because the induction opposed to it is complete? How can we have a right to declare the induction complete, while facts, supported by credible evidence, present themselves in opposition to it?