Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER THIRD. INDUCTIVE TRUTHS. I. Scattered Facts. AN eminent man is reported as saying that there are more false facts than false theories. There is truth in this. Facts are apt to have adjuncts to them in the reports given by others, and even in our own apprehensions of them, or they are so mutilated that they take an entirely distorted form. We all know how, in story-telling, additions and subtractions are apt to be made even by honest narrators, so as to make it more attractive and picturesque. The individual facts are primarily made known by the senses. In these there may be very numerous and complicated details, and any of these if left out may so far distort our apprehensions and the account we give of them. Besides, sensations, feelings, fancies, inferences, attachments, and repugnances may mingle with our pure perception of sense and cast a glow or a gloom around them. In these sections I am showing that we have to guardagainst these temptations, and that when we do so we can arrive at positive truth. Observation Proper and Experiment.?These are the two ways in which we obtain facts. In the former we view objects simply as they present themselves; in the latter we put them in new positions. The advantage of Experiment over Observation Proper (which may be so designated as Experiment is, after all, a kind of Observation) is that it enables us to perceive the proper action of the several agencies joined in nature. We wish to know whether bodies, whatever be their weight, fall to the ground in equal times. Common observation seems to show that they do not, as we see the gold nugget and the leaf falling at very different times. But we put the gold and the leaf into the exhausted receiver of an air-pump and find them fall the same instant. What we should do in...
评价“The Tests of the Various Kinds of Truth, Being A Treatise of Applied Logic”