Abstract
Isolated facts exist only because of our limited sense and intellectual equipment. Instinctively and of itself, thought spins observation further and completes a fact as regards its parts, consequences and conditions. A hunter finds a feather and his phantasy immediately produces the image of the whole bird that has lost it. A sea current carries exotic plants, animal carcases, finely carved wooden objects, and Columbus visualizes the far-off and as yet unknown land from which these objects originate. Herodotus (II, 19–27) observes the regular floods of the Nile and imagines the strangest causes for these events. Even higher animals are accustomed to draw out observed facts in this way, though in very primitive form. A cat looking for its image behind a mirror has formulated a hypothesis, albeit instinctive and unconscious, as regards its bodily character, and thus begins to test it; but while at this point the cat stops, it is precisely here that man in analogous cases begins to wonder and reflect.
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Notes
Cf. Tylor, Urgeschichte, pp. 398–403.
This is a slight modification of the formulation given by P. Biedermann, Die Bedeutung der Hypothese, Dresden 1894, p. 10. In this excellent treatise it is shown that what in scientific thought is called hypothesis and in ordinary thought conjecture are closely related. In any case we can speak of supplementing the facts in imagination or thought; though if this done deliberately and consciously, the expression ‘conjecturing’ or ‘assuming’ is more appropriate.
Philosophiae naturalis Principia mathematica, Lib. III Regulae philosophandi, reg. 1.
Ibid., Lib. III, Sect. V.
Newtoni Opera, ed. Horseley London 1782, Tom. IV, pp. 437–438. In his correspondence with Bentley, Newton’s aim is to gain a proof of the rule of divine wisdom from the ordering of the universe. His expression ‘inanimate brute matter’ shows clearly that Newton regarded animate matter as something quite different, thinking it more versatile than the former. This dualism, so ingrained from our savage ancestors down, is not overcome even today.
W. Thomson too, in his work On the dynamical theory of heat (1852), felt bound to say “it is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects”.
Even H. Hertz (Die Prinzipien der Mechanik, 1894), who assumes that all physics can be put on a mechanistic-atomist basis, regards it as necessary, 200 years after Newton, explicitly to confine this view to inanimate nature (p. 165).
Finally, Boltzmann (1897) discusses the question of ‘the objective existence of processes in inanimate nature’. I freely admit that ‘inanimate’ matter seems no less puzzling to me than animate, and that I regard the contrary view as a residue of some old superstition. As long as it is believed that all physics can be exhaustively treated by mechanics, regarding the latter in turn exhausted by the simple doctrines discovered up to the present, life must indeed appear to be something hyperphysical. However, I reject both these views.
Newtoni Optice, London 1719, pp. 412, 413.
J. S. Mill, a, Induktive Logik, ed. Gomperz, 1885, II, pp. 208–225.
Hillebrand, ‘Zur Lehre von der Hypothesenbildung’, SB. d. Wiener Akademic, philos.-histor. Cl 134, 1896.
Jevons, The principles of science, 1892, p. 510.
Priestley, History and present state of discoveries relating to vision, light and colours, London 1772, Vol. I, p. 181.
Jevons, l.c., pp. 522 f.
For detailed accounts of hypotheses closely linked with special sciences and their degree of development, see E. Naville, La logique de l’hypothèse, 2nd ed., Paris 1895.
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© 1976 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Mach, E., Hiebert, E.N. (1976). Hypothesis. In: Knowledge and Error. Vienna Circle Collection, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1428-1_14
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