us conditions, and again by
the circumstances of each man's life, demands an extraordinary union of
sympathetic imagination with scientific habits of thought. Such should
be the equipment of the historian, who pursues the same method of
hypothesis when he attempts to explain (say) the state of parties upon
the Exclusion Bill, or the policy of Louis XI. Problems such as the
former of these are the easier; because, amidst the compromises of a
party, personal peculiarities obliterate one another, and expose a
simpler scheme of human nature with fewer fig-leaves. Much more
hazardous hypotheses are necessary in interpreting the customs of
savages, and the feelings of all sorts of animals. Literary criticisms,
again, abound with hypotheses: e.g., as to the composition of the
Homeric poems, the order of the Platonic dialogues, the authorship of
the Caedmonic poems, or the Ossianic, or of the letters of Junius. Thus
the method of our everyday thoughts is identical with that of our most
refined speculations; and in every case we have to find whether the
hypothesis accounts for the facts.

Sec. 2. It follows from the definition of an hypothesis that none is of
any use that does not admit of verification (proof or disproof), by
comparing the results that may be deduced from it with facts or laws. If
so framed as to elude every attempt to test it by facts, it can never be
proved by them nor add anything to our understanding of them.

Suppose that a conjurer asserts that his table is controlled by the
spirit of your deceased relative, and makes it rap out an account of
some adventure that could not easily have been within a stranger's
knowledge. So far good. Then, trying again, the table raps out some
blunder about your family which the deceased relative could not have
committed; but the conjurer explains that 'a lying spirit' sometimes
possesses the table. This amendment of the hypothesis makes it equally
compatible with success and with failure. To pass from small things to
great, not dissimilar was the case of the Ptolemaic Astronomy: by
successive modifications, its hypothesis was made to correspond with
accumulating observations of the celestial motions so ingeniously that,
until the telescope was invented, it may be said to have been
unverifiable. Consider, again, the sociological hypothesis, that civil
order was at first founded on a Contract which remains binding upon all
mankind: this is reconcilable with the most opposite