Introduction to science / by Alex Hill.

  • Alexander Hill
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introduction to science / by Alex Hill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Although all intelligent knowledge is science the term as commonly used has certain limitations. It is especially applied to the observation of natural phenomena and to the discovery of the laws which govern them, and hence it has come to be almost synonymous with inductive science. Pure speculation, if such a process be possible, belongs to the province of philosophy, which province also includes the deductions which result from the analysis of consciousness. In some usages we find the term “ science ” limited to the natural sciences, as for example when we speak of “ a man of science.” Yet, on the other hand, when the methods of science are employed in the elucidation of work which is strictly Man’s and not Nature’s, the use of the methods leads to the appropriation of the name. No one, for example, can assert of any event recorded in history that it is a fact, in the same sense in which a biologist is justified in describ¬ ing a particular stage through which an egg passes in the development of a chick, as a fact; yet the work of an historian is said to be scientific when, wishing to supply an event which was not recorded by the chroniclers of the time in which it presumably occurred, he adopts the same inductive method which a biologist would follow if he wished to figure to himself a stage in development which for any reason it is impossible for him to observe. On the same grounds we speak of the “ science of criticism” and of various other sub¬ jects, far removed from the study of Nature. Reduced to its lowest terms, science is the observation of phenomena and the colligation of the results of observation into groups. By observation we discover that a particular fish is coloured like the seaweeds which grow on the rocks in the neighbourhood where it is found, and where we further observe it to be feeding. In other places where the growth upon the rocks is differently coloured, we observe that the fish are differently coloured but that they still resemble the sea¬ weeds. From many similar observations giving the same result we formulate the “law,” that fish which feed in the neighbourhood of rocks are coloured like the rocks and the
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