Abstract
IN the few remarks which I communicated to this journal (vol. xxvii. p. 554) under the above heading, I protested against the deductive method used in a purely literary manner as a mischievous way of attacking biological problems. Mr. William White objects that if I am right the deductive method must be excluded altogether “as a false and dangerous element of philosophy.” I do not myself see that this necessarily follows. The pith of what I said simply amounts to this—the biological sciences not having reached the deductive stage, it is not possible to enlarge our knowledge in them by mere ratiocination. This is I apprehend no more than is laid down by Mr. Mill himself. Writing of the conditions under which the deductive method is applicable, he expressly says that without one indispensable adjunct “all the results it can give have little other value than that of guesswork” (“System of Logic,” 4th ed. vol. i. p. 498). The indispensable adjunct is verification, which requires the substitution of the work-table for the desk. When the former has put the stamp of confirmation on the speculations elaborated at the latter we get a scientific result which commands attention. Without this confirmation I am still of opinion that the deductive result is only “a literary performance.” It is worth noting that the able writer whose papers and method I took the liberty of criticising so far admitted the validity of what I said, that he promised to have some experiments made which would go a considerable way towards demolishing or sustaining the results at which he had so far arrived only deductively.
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DYER, W. Deductive Biology. Nature 28, 171 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/028171c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/028171c0
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