nfronting a theory with facts. Buffon was for
explaining the formation of the earth and the other planets, and their
lateral movement, by the hypothesis that a comet had fallen obliquely on
to the sun, driven off certain portions of its constituent matter in a
state of fusion, and that these masses, made spherical by the mutual
attraction of their parts, were carried to different distances in
proportion to their mass and the force originally impressed on them.
Buffon may have been actuated, both here and in his other famous
hypothesis of reproduction, by a desire, less to propound a true and
durable explanation, than to arrest by a bold and comprehensive
generalisation that attention, which is only imperfectly touched by mere
collections of particular facts. The enormous impulse which even the
most unscientific of the speculations of Descartes had given to European
thought, was a standing temptation to philosophers, not to discard nor
relax patient observation, but to bind together the results which they
arrived at by this process, by means of some hardy hypothesis. It might
be true or not, but it was at any rate sure to strike the imagination,
which ever craves wholes; and to stimulate discussion and further
discovery, by sending assailants and defenders alike in search of new
facts, to confirm or overthrow the position.[20]

[Footnote 20: See Condorcet's eloge on Buffon (_OEuv._ iii. 335); and
a passage from Bourdon, quoted in Whewell's _Hist. Induct. Sci._ iii.
348.]

Turgot was less sensible of these possible advantages, than he was alive
to the certain dangers of such a method. He perceived that to hold a
theory otherwise than as an inference from facts, is to have a strong
motive for looking at the facts in a predetermined light, or for
ignoring them; an involuntary predisposition most fatal to the discovery
of truth, which is nothing more than the conformity of our conception of
facts to their adequately observed order. Why, he asks, do you replunge
us into the night of hypotheses, justifying the Cartesians and their
three elements and their vortices? And whence comes your comet? Was it
within the sphere of the sun's attraction? If not, how could it fall
from the sphere of the other bodies, and fall on the sun, which was not
acting on it? If it was, it must have fallen perpendicularly, not
obliquely; and, therefore, if it imparted a lateral movement, this
direction must have been impressed on it. And, if so, why