Logic: Deductive and Inductive

Applied to History, the Comparative Method rests upon an assumption (which the known facts of (say) 6,000 years amply justify) that human nature, after attaining a recognisable type as homo sapiens, is approximately uniform in all countries and in all ages, though more especially where states of culture are similar. Men living in society are actuated by similar motives and reasons in similar ways; they are all dependent upon the supply of food and therefore on the sun and the seasons and the weather and upon means of making fire, and so on. Accordingly, they entertain similar beliefs, and develop similar institutions through similar series of changes. Hence, if in one nation some institution has been altered for reasons that we cannot directly discover, whereas we know the reasons why a similar change was adopted elsewhere, we may conjecture with more or less probability, after making allowance for differences in other circumstances, that the motives or causes in the former case were similar to those in the latter, or in any cases that are better known. Or, again, if in one nation we cannot trace an institution beyond a certain point, but can show that elsewhere a similar institution has had such or such an antecedent history, we may venture to reconstruct with more or less probability the earlier history of that institution in the nation we are studying.

Amongst the English and Saxon tribes that settled in Britain, death was the penalty for murder, and the criminal was delivered to the next-of-kin of his victim for execution; he might, however, compound for his crime by paying a certain compensation. Studying the history of other tribes in various parts of the world, we are able, with much probability, to reconstruct the antecedents of this death-penalty in our own prehistoric ages, and to trace it to the blood-feud; that is, to a tribal condition in which the next-of-kin of a murdered man was socially and religiously bound to avenge him by slaying the murderer or one of his kindred. This duty of revenge is sometimes (and perhaps was at first everywhere) regarded as necessary to appease the ghost of the victim; sometimes as necessary to compensate the surviving members of his family. In the latter case, it is open to them to accept compensation in money or cattle, etc. Whether the kin will be ready to accept compensation must depend upon the value they set upon wealth in comparison with revenge; but for the sake of order and tribal strength, it is the interest of the tribe, or its elders, or chieftain, to encourage or even to enforce such acceptance. It is also their interest to take the questions—whether a crime has been committed, by whom, and what compensation is due—out of the hands of the injured party, and to submit them to some sort of court or judicial authority. At first, following ancient custom as much as possible, the act of requital, or the choice of accepting compensation, is left to the next-of-kin; but with the growth of central power these things are entrusted to ministers of the Government. Then revenge has undergone its full transformation into punishment. Very likely the wrong itself will come to be treated as having been done not to the kindred of the murdered man, but to the State or the King, as in fact a "breach of the King's peace." This happened in our own history.

(4) The Comparative Method assumes that human nature is approximately the same in different countries and ages; but, of course, 'approximately' is an important word. Although there is often a striking and significant resemblance between the beliefs and institutions of widely separated peoples, we expect to draw the most instructive parallels between those who are nearly related by descent, or neighbourhood, or culture. To shed light upon our own manners, we turn first to other Teutons, then to Slavonians and Kelts, or other Aryans, and so on; and we prefer evidence from Europe to examples from Africa.

(5) As to national culture, that it exhibits certain 'stages' of development is popularly recognised in the distinction drawn between savages, barbarians and civilised folk. But the idea remains rather vague; and there is not space here to define it. I refer, therefore, to the classifications of stages of culture given by A. Sutherland, (Origin and Growth of Moral Instinct, Vol. I, p. 103), and L.T. Hobhouse (Morals in Evolution, c. 2). That in any 'state of Society,' its factors—religion, government, science, etc.—are mutually dependent, was a leading doctrine with Comte, adopted by Mill. There must be some truth in it; but in some cases we do not understand social influences sufficiently well to trace the connection of factors; and whilst preferring to look for historical parallels between nations of similar culture, we find many cases in which barbarous or savage customs linger in a civilised country.

(6) It was another favourite doctrine with Comte, also adopted by Mill—that the general state of culture is chiefly determined by the prevailing intellectual condition of a people, especially by the accepted ground of explanation—whether the will of supernatural beings, or occult powers, or physical antecedents: the "law of three stages," Fetichism, Metaphysics, Positivism. And this also is, at least, so far true, that it is useless to try to interpret the manners and institutions of any nation until we know its predominant beliefs. Magic and animism are beliefs everywhere held by mankind in early stages of culture, and they influence every action of life. But that is not all: these beliefs retain their hold upon great multitudes of civilised men and affect the thoughts of the most enlightened. Whilst the saying 'that human nature is the same in all ages' seems to make no allowance for the fact that, in some nations, a considerable number of individuals has attained to powers of deliberation, self-control, and exact reasoning, far above the barbarous level, it is yet so far true that, even in civilised countries, masses of people, were it not for the example and instruction of those individuals, would fall back upon magic and animism and the manners that go with those beliefs. The different degrees of enlightenment enjoyed by different classes of the population often enable the less educated to preserve a barbarous custom amidst many civilised characteristics of the national life.

§ 8. Historical reasoning must start from, or be verified by, observations. If we are writing the history of ourselves: if of another time or country, we can observe some of the present conditions of the country, its inhabitants, language, manners, institutions, which are effects of the past and must be traceable to it; we may also be able to observe ancient buildings or their ruins, funerary remains, coins, dating from the very times we are to treat of. Our own observations, of course, are by no means free from error.

But even in treating of our own age and country, most of our information must be derived from the testimony of others, who may have made mistakes of observation and further mistakes in reporting their observations, or may have intentionally falsified them. Testimony is of two kinds: Oral; and Written, inscribed or printed. In investigating the events of a remote age, nearly all our direct evidence must be some sort of testimony.

(1) Oral testimony depends upon the character of the witness; and the best witness is not perfectly trustworthy; for he may not have observed accurately, or he may not have reported correctly; especially if some time elapsed between the event and his account of it; for no man's memory is perfect. Since witnesses vary widely in capacity and integrity, we must ask concerning any one of them—was he a good judge of what he saw, and of what was really important in the event? Had he good opportunities of knowing the circumstances? Had he any interest in the event—personal, or partisan, or patriotic? Such interests would colour his report; and so would the love of telling a dramatic story, if that was a weakness of his. Nay, a love of truth might lead him to modify the report of what he remembered if—as he remembered it—the matter seemed not quite credible. We must also bear in mind that, for want of training, precision in speaking the truth is not understood or appreciated by many honest people even now, still less in unscientific ages.

Oral tradition is formed by passing a report from one to another, generation by generation; and it is generally true that such a tradition loses credit at every step, because every narrator has some weakness. However, the value of tradition depends upon the motives people have to report correctly, and on the form of the communication, and on whether monuments survive in connection with the story. Amongst the things best remembered are religious and magic formulæ, heroic poems, lists of ancestors, popular legends about deeply impressive events, such as migrations, conquests, famines, plagues. We are apt now to underrate the value of tradition, because the use of writing has made tradition less important, and therefore less pains are taken to preserve it. In the middle of last century, it was usual (and then quite justifiable) to depreciate oral tradition as nearly worthless; but the spread of archæological and anthropological research, and the growth of the Comparative Method, have given new significance to legends and traditions which, merely by themselves, could not deserve the slightest confidence.

(2) As to written evidence, contemporary inscriptions—such as are found on rocks and stones and bricks in various parts of the world, and most abundantly in Egypt and Western Asia—are of the highest value, because least liable to fraudulent abuse; but must be considered with reference to the motives of those who set them forth. Manuscripts and books give rise to many difficulties. We have to consider whether they were originally written by some one contemporary with the events recorded: if so they have the same value as immediate oral testimony, provided they have not been tampered with since. But if not contemporary records, they may have been derived from other records that were contemporary, or only from oral tradition. In the latter case they are vitiated by the weakness of oral tradition. In the former case, we have to ask what was the trustworthiness of the original records, and how far do the extant writings fairly represent those records?

Our answers to these questions will partly depend upon what we know or can discover of the authors of the MSS. or books. Who was the author? If a work bears some man's name, did he really write it? The evidence bearing upon this question is usually divided into internal, external and mixed; but perhaps no evidence is purely internal, if we define it as that which is derived entirely from the work itself. Under the name of internal evidence it is usual to put the language, the style, consistency of ideas; but if we had no grounds of judgment but the book itself, we could not possibly say whether the style was the author's: this requires us to know his other works. Nor could we say whether the language was that of his age, unless we knew other literature of the same age; nor even that different passages seem to be written in the manner of different ages, but for our knowledge of change in other literatures. There must in every case be some external reference. Thus we judge that a work is not by the alleged author, nor contemporary with him, if words are used that only became current at a later date, or are used in a sense that they only later acquired, or if later writers are imitated, or if events are mentioned that happened later ('anachronism'). Books are sometimes forged outright, that is, are written by one man and deliberately fathered upon another; but sometimes books come to be ascribed to a well-known name, which were written by some one else without fraudulent intent, dramatically or as a rhetorical exercise.

As to external evidence, if from other sources we have some knowledge of the facts described in a given book, and if it presents no serious discrepancies with those facts, this is some confirmation of a claim to contemporaneity. But the chief source of external evidence is other literature, where we may find the book in question referred to or quoted. Such other literature may be by another author, as when Aristotle refers to a dialogue of Plato's, or Shakespeare quotes Marlowe; or may be other work of the author himself, as when Aristotle in the Ethics refers to his own Physics, or Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales mentions as his own The Legend of Good Women, and in The Legend gives a list of other works of his. This kind of argument assumes that the authorship of the work we start from is undisputed; which is practically the case with the Ethics and The Canterbury Tales.

But, now, granting that a work is by a good author, or contemporary with the events recorded, or healthily related to others that were contemporary, it remains to consider whether it has been well preserved and is likely to retain its original sense. It is, therefore, desirable to know the history of a book or MS., and through whose hands it has passed. Have there been opportunities of tampering with it; and have there been motives to do so? In reprinting books, but still more in copying MSS., there are opportunities of omitting or interpolating passages, or of otherwise altering the sense. In fact, slight changes are almost sure to be made even without meaning to make them, especially in copying MSS., through the carelessness or ignorance of transcribers. Hence the oldest MS. is reckoned the best.

If a work contains stories that are physically impossible, it shows a defect of judgment in the author, and decreases our confidence in his other statements; but it does not follow that these others are to be rejected. We must try to compare them with other evidence. Even incredible stories are significant: they show what people were capable of believing, and, therefore, under what conditions they reasoned and acted. One cause of the incredibility of popular stories is the fusion of legend with myth. A legend is a traditionary story about something that really happened: it may have been greatly distorted by stupidity, or exaggeration, or dramatisation, or rationalisation, but may still retain a good deal of the original fact. A myth, however, has not necessarily any basis of fact: it may be a sort of primitive philosophy, an hypothesis freely invented to explain some fact in nature, such as eclipses, or to explain some social custom whose origin is forgotten, such as the sacrificing of a ram.

All historical conclusions, then, depend on a sum of convergent and conflicting probabilities in the nature of circumstantial evidence. The best testimony is only highly probable, and it is always incomplete. To complete the picture of any past age there is no resource but the Comparative Method. We use this method without being aware of it, whenever we make the records of the last generation intelligible to ourselves by our own experience. Without it nothing would be intelligible: an ancient coin or weapon would have no meaning, were we not acquainted with the origins and uses of other coins and weapons. Generally, the further we go back in history, the more the evidence needs interpretation and reconstruction, and the more prominent becomes the appeal to the Comparative Method. Our aim is to construct a history of the world, and of the planet as part of the world, and of mankind as part of the life of the planet, in such a way that every event shall be consistent with, and even required by, the rest according to the principle of Causation.

CHAPTER XVIII

HYPOTHESES

§ 1. An Hypothesis, sometimes employed instead of a known law, as a premise in the deductive investigation of nature, is defined by Mill as "any supposition which we make (either without actual evidence, or on evidence avowedly insufficient) in order to endeavour to deduce from it conclusions in accordance with facts which are known to be real; under the idea that if the conclusions to which the hypothesis leads are known truths, the hypothesis itself either must be, or at least is likely to be, true." The deduction of known truths from an hypothesis is its Verification; and when this has been accomplished in a good many cases, and there are no manifest failures, the hypothesis is often called a Theory; though this term is also used for the whole system of laws of a certain class of phenomena, as when Astronomy is called the 'theory of the heavens.' Between hypothesis and theory in the former sense no distinct line can be drawn; for the complete proof of any speculation may take a long time, and meanwhile the gradually accumulating evidence produces in different minds very different degrees of satisfaction; so that the sanguine begin to talk of 'the theory,' whilst the circumspect continue to call it 'the hypothesis.'

An Hypothesis may be made concerning (1) an Agent, such as the ether; or (2) a Collocation, such as the plan of our solar system—whether geocentric or heliocentric; or (3) a Law of an agent's operation, as that light is transmitted by a wave motion of such lengths or of such rates of vibration.

The received explanation of light involves both an agent, the ether, as an all-pervading elastic fluid, and also the law of its operation, as transmitting light in waves of definite form and length, with definite velocity. The agreement between the calculated results of this complex hypothesis and the observed phenomena of light is the chief part of the verification; which has now been so successfully accomplished that we generally hear of the 'Undulatory Theory.' Sometimes a new agent only is proposed; as the planet Neptune was at first assumed to exist in order to account for perturbations in the movements of Uranus, influencing it according to the already established law of gravitation. Sometimes the agents are known, and only the law of their operation is hypothetical, as was at first the case with the law of gravitation itself. For the agents, namely, Earth, falling bodies on the Earth, Moon, Sun, and planets were manifest; and the hypothesis was that their motions might be due to their attracting one another with a force inversely proportional to the squares of the distances between them. In the Ptolemaic Astronomy, again, there was an hypothesis as to the collocation of the heavenly bodies (namely, that our Earth was the centre of the universe, and that Moon, Sun, planets and stars revolved around her): in the early form of the system there was also an hypothesis concerning agents upon which this arrangement depended (namely, the crystalline spheres in which the heavenly bodies were fixed, though these were afterwards declared to be imaginary); and an hypothesis concerning the law of operation (namely, that circular motion is the most perfect and eternal, and therefore proper to celestial things).

Hypotheses are by no means confined to the physical sciences: we all make them freely in private life. In searching for anything, we guess where it may be before going to look for it: the search for the North Pole was likewise guided by hypotheses how best to get there. In estimating the characters or explaining the conduct of acquaintances or of public men, we frame hypotheses as to their dispositions and principles. 'That we should not impute motives' is a peculiarly absurd maxim, as there is no other way of understanding human life. To impute bad motives, indeed, when good are just as probable, is to be wanting in the scientific spirit, which views every subject in 'a dry light.' Nor can we help 'judging others by ourselves'; for self-knowledge is the only possible starting-point when we set out to interpret the lives of others. But to understand the manifold combinations of which the elements of character are susceptible, and how these are determined by the breeding of race or family under various conditions, and again by the circumstances of each man's life, demands an extraordinary union of sympathetic imagination with scientific habits of thought. Such should be the equipment of the historian, who pursues the same method of hypothesis when he attempts to explain (say) the state of parties upon the Exclusion Bill, or the policy of Louis XI. Problems such as the former of these are the easier; because, amidst the compromises of a party, personal peculiarities obliterate one another, and expose a simpler scheme of human nature with fewer fig-leaves. Much more hazardous hypotheses are necessary in interpreting the customs of savages, and the feelings of all sorts of animals. Literary criticisms, again, abound with hypotheses: e.g., as to the composition of the Homeric poems, the order of the Platonic dialogues, the authorship of the Cædmonic poems, or the Ossianic, or of the letters of Junius. Thus the method of our everyday thoughts is identical with that of our most refined speculations; and in every case we have to find whether the hypothesis accounts for the facts.

§ 2. It follows from the definition of an hypothesis that none is of any use that does not admit of verification (proof or disproof), by comparing the results that may be deduced from it with facts or laws. If so framed as to elude every attempt to test it by facts, it can never be proved by them nor add anything to our understanding of them.

Suppose that a conjurer asserts that his table is controlled by the spirit of your deceased relative, and makes it rap out an account of some adventure that could not easily have been within a stranger's knowledge. So far good. Then, trying again, the table raps out some blunder about your family which the deceased relative could not have committed; but the conjurer explains that 'a lying spirit' sometimes possesses the table. This amendment of the hypothesis makes it equally compatible with success and with failure. To pass from small things to great, not dissimilar was the case of the Ptolemaic Astronomy: by successive modifications, its hypothesis was made to correspond with accumulating observations of the celestial motions so ingeniously that, until the telescope was invented, it may be said to have been unverifiable. Consider, again, the sociological hypothesis, that civil order was at first founded on a Contract which remains binding upon all mankind: this is reconcilable with the most opposite institutions. For we have no record of such an event: and if the institutions of one State (say the British) include ceremonies, such as the coronation oath and oath of allegiance, which may be remnants of an original contract, they may nevertheless be of comparatively recent origin; whereas if the institutions of another State (say the Russian) contain nothing that admits of similar interpretation, yet traces of the contract once existing may long since have been obliterated. Moreover, the actual contents of the contract not having been preserved, every adherent of this hypothesis supplies them at his own discretion, 'according to the dictates of Reason'; and so one derives from it the duty of passive obedience, and another with equal cogency establishes the right of rebellion.

To be verifiable, then, an hypothesis must be definite; if somewhat vague in its first conception (which is reasonably to be expected), it must be made definite in order to be put to the proof. But, except this condition of verifiability, and definiteness for the sake of verifiability, without which a proposition does not deserve the name of an hypothesis, it seems inadvisable to lay down rules for a 'legitimate' hypothesis. The epithet is misleading. It suggests that the Logician makes rules for scientific inquirers; whereas his business is to discover the principles which they, in fact, employ in what are acknowledged to be their most successful investigations. If he did make rules for them, and they treated him seriously, they might be discouraged in the exercise of that liberty of hypothesising which is the condition of all originality; whilst if they paid no attention to him, he must suffer some loss of dignity. Again, to say that a 'legitimate hypothesis' must explain all the facts, at least in the department for which it is invented, is decidedly discouraging. No doubt it may be expected to do this in the long run when (if ever) it is completely established; but this may take a long time: is it meanwhile illegitimate? Or can this adjective be applied to Newton's corpuscular theory of light, even though it has failed to explain all the facts?

§ 3. Given a verifiable hypothesis, however, what constitutes proof or disproof?