Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 by Various
page 90 of 267 (33%)
page 90 of 267 (33%)
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to explore with the most tedious research, the most plodding patience,
and the most destructive intellectual tension, in order to accumulate a limited array of Facts, is somewhat doubtful. The significant sentence which occurs in the second volume of his work, closely following the announcement of his disappointment at being unable to achieve all that he had expected and promised, and which states that 'in a complete scheme of our knowledge, and when all our resources are fully developed and marshalled into order, as they must eventually be, the two methods [the Inductive and the Deductive] will be, not hostile, but supplementary, and will be combined into a single system,' seems to indicate that at some period prior to the publication of the second volume, and subsequent to the issue of the first, the insufficient nature of the Inductive Method as a Scientific guide broke upon him, and some conception of the nature of a Mode of Reasoning which should combine the two Processes in just relations, began to dawn into his mind. That he obtained anything more than a faint glimpse of the true Method, is not likely. Had he done so, he would certainly have made some statement of the great results which would follow its inauguration, even if he could have refrained from bestowing one of his glowing and enraptured paragraphs upon the fairest and most entrancing vision of future achievement which the devotee of intellectual investigation will ever witness. It is probable, that in carrying on his investigations after the publication of the first volume of his work, finding it impossible to handle the accumulations of Facts necessary to his purpose, and discovering the inexactitude and insufficiency of his Generalizations in the ratio that the bounds of his field of inquiry enlarged, he was led to perceive the essential weakness and inadequacy of the Inductive |
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