Probably any jury would consider those facts a very
good experimental verification of your hypothesis, touching the cause
of the abnormal phenomena observed in your parlor, and would act
accordingly.
Now, in this supposititious case, I have taken phenomena of a very
common kind, in order that you might see what are the different steps in
an ordinary process of reasoning, if you will only take the trouble to
analyse it carefully. All the operations I have described, you will
see, are involved in the mind of any man of sense in leading him to
a conclusion as to the course he should take in order to make good a
robbery and punish the offender. I say that you are led, in that case,
to your conclusion by exactly the same train of reasoning as that which
a man of science pursues when he is endeavouring to discover the origin
and laws of the most occult phenomena. The process is, and always must
be, the same; and precisely the same mode of reasoning was employed by
Newton [90] and Laplace [91] in their endeavours to discover and define
the causes of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as you, with your
own common sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The only difference
is, that the nature of the inquiry being more abstruse, every step has
to be most carefully watched, so that there may not be a single crack
or flaw in your hypothesis.
Pages:
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152