An examination of the Report of the Commissioners to enquire into the mortality of the Army / by Alfred Aspland.

  • Alfred Aspland
Date:
[1859]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An examination of the Report of the Commissioners to enquire into the mortality of the Army / by Alfred Aspland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    been starved. When writers like Mill and Macaulay treat him with scorn, what chance has he with the less sagacious? Who could recognise Bacon’s method in the ludicrous picture of a man stuffing himself with mince pies, suffering from nightmare, and then avoiding them and sleeping soundly, to wake in the morning, and arrive at the conclusion by the inductive method that the mince pies had caused his disturbance ? This is a simple inference. The true method, separated from its meta- physical jargon, from scholastic terms and modes of thought, is a very different thing from this, and will be equal to all the requirements of scientific investigation. You must see that you may foresee. You must generalise slowly from particular things to those but one step more general, from those to others of still greater extent, and so on to such as are universal. Assume nothing. Form no theories. Interrogate, but do not anticipate nature. Observe closely and rigorously; verify your observations. Multiply your observations and verifications. Thus you arrive at facts. Next examine their relation and succession, remembering always the law which Comte has defined, that in proportion to the complexity of the phenomena is the increase of the number of relations in which they may be surveyed and made the subject of experiments. Thus you arrive at laws. At each step the process of verification to be rigorous. The classification, observance o£,.^hfi, similitudes, and succes- sion of these laws into one general system, constitute the highest aims of Positive Philosophy. It matters not whether the last process is termed deductive or inductive. It really is and can be nothing more than an advanced stage of the inductive method. To illustrate this,—an observation is made that a man without obvious disease, dies in a chamber filled with carbonic acid gas. To ascertain the relation between the gas and the death, we proceed according to the method. An examination detects no disease of internal parts, known to produce death, except sundry