mited by its author to
the Physical Sciences only. In addition to this circumscribed
application, it is moreover indistinct by reason of the use of the word
Ideas, a word to which so many different significations have been
attached by different writers that its meaning is vague and
undefined--to convey the impression of Laws or Principles. The same
defect exists in the detailed exposition is perhaps the most extended
and complete extant.

But even when we gain a clear conception of the proposition which
Professor Whewell only vaguely apprehends and therefore does not clearly
state, namely--that Science is an assemblage of Facts correlated by Laws
or Principles, a system in which the mutual _relations_ of the Facts are
known, and the Laws or Principles established by them are
discovered;--when we understand this ever so distinctly, we are still at
the beginning of a knowledge of what constitutes Science. When do we
know that we have a Fact? How are we to be sure that our proof is not
defective? By what means shall it be certain, beyond the cavil of a
doubt, that the right Laws or Principles, and no more than those
warranted by the Facts, are deduced? These and some other questions must
be definitely settled before we can thoroughly comprehend the nature of
Science, and the consideration of which brings us, in the first place,
to the examination of the characteristics of Scientific Methods.

The intellectual development of the world has proceeded under the
operation of three Methods. Two of these, identical in their mode of
action, but arriving, nevertheless, at widely different results, from
the different points at which they take their departure, are not
commonly discriminated, but are both included in the technical term
_Deductive Method_. The other is denominated the _Inductive_. A brief
analysis of these Methods will clear the way for an understanding of the
nature of Science, particularly in its application to the subject of
History, with which we are at present especially concerned.

The earliest evolution of that which has been called Science,--the
Mathematics, which we dismiss for the instant, excepted,--took place
under the operation of a Method, which, ordinarily confounded with the
true Deductive one, is now better known among rigorous Scientists as the
Hypothetical or Anticipative Method. This has two modes of expression,
one of which consists in the assumption of Laws or Principles, which
have not been ad