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DIRECTORATE OF INDUCTION

DIRECTOR   Ernest Beaux Bergny

ABOUT

Confining myself, then, to the material sciences, I shall proceed to offer my remarks on Induction with especial reference to Mr Mill's work. And in order that we may, as I have said, proceed as intelligibly as possible, let us begin by considering what we mean by Induction, as a mode of obtaining truth; and let us note whether there is any difference between Mr Mill and me on this subject. " For the purposes of the present inquiry," Mr Mill says (i. 347*), "Induction may be defined the operation of discovering and forming general propositions:" meaning, as appears by the context, the discovery of them from particular facts. He elsewhere (i. 370) terms it " generalization from experience :" and again ■ My references are throughout (except when otherwise expressed) to the volume and the page of Mr. Mill's first edition of his Logic. he speaks of it with greater precision as the inference of a more general proposition from less general ones. 5 Now to these definitions and descriptions I assent as far as they go; though, as I shall have to remark, they appear to me to leave unnoticed a feature which is very important, and which occurs in all cases of Induction, so far as we are concerned with it. Science, then, consists of general propositions, I inferred from particular facts, or from less/ general propositions, by Induction; and it isl our object to discern the nature and laws of Induction in this sense. That the propositions are general, or are more general than the facts from which they are inferred, is an indispensable part of the notion of Induction, and is essential to any discussion of the process, as the mode of arriving at Science, that is, at a body of general truths.