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Science And Pseudo-Science
by
FOOTNOTES:
[20] Nineteenth Century, March, 1887.
[21] The Duke of Argyll speaks of the recent date of the demonstration of the fallacy of the doctrine in question. “Recent” is a relative term, but I may mention that the question is fully discussed in my book on Hume; which, if I may believe my publishers, has been read by a good many people since it appeared in 1879. Moreover, I observe, from a note at page 89 of The Reign of Law, a work to which I shall have occasion to advert by and by, that the Duke of Argyll draws attention to the circumstance that, so long ago as 1866, the views which I hold on this subject were well known. The Duke, in fact, writing about this time, says, after quoting a phrase of mine: “The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands to be simply a question of evidence.” In science, we think that a teacher who ignores views which have been discussed coram populo for twenty years, is hardly up to the mark.
[22] See also vol. i. p. 460. In the ninth edition (1853), published twenty-three years after the first. Lyell deprives even the most careless reader of any excuse for misunderstanding him: “So in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the perpetual uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth-crust is quite consistent with the admission of their alternate development and suspension for indefinite periods within limited geographical areas” (p. 187).
[23] A great many years ago (Presidential Address to the Geological Society, 1869) I ventured to indicate that which seemed to me to be the weak point, not in the fundamental principles of uniformitarianism, but in uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell. It lay, to my mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a less degree by Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time recorded by the stratified rocks. I said: “This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and deductive reasoning from the things which are to the things which were–this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have cost uniformitarianism the place as the permanent form of geological speculation which it might otherwise have held” (Lay Sermons, p. 260). The context shows that “uniformitarianism” here means that doctrine, as limited in application by Hutton and Lyell, and that what I mean by “evolutionism” is consistent and thorough-going uniformitarianism.
[24] Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. i. p. 670. New edition, 1847.
[25] At Glasgow in 1856.
[26] Optics, query 31.
[27] The author recognises this in his Explanations.