The Method of Scientific__ Investigation

The Method of Scientific Investigation (长句翻译) The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind;it is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about and given precise and exact explanation.There is no more difference,but there is just the same kind of difference,between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person,as there is between the operations and methods of a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales,and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graded weights.It is not that the scales in the one case,and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working;but that the latter is a much finer apparatus and of course much more accurate in its measurement than the former. You will understand this better, perhaps,if I give you some familiar examples.You have all heard it repeated that men of science work by means of induction and deduction,that by the help of these operations,they,in a sort of sense, manage to extract from Nature certain natural laws,and that out of these,by some special skill of their own,they build up their theories.And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can be by no means compared with these processes,and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special training.To hear all these large words,you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men;but if you will not be frightened by terms,you will discover that you-are quite wrong,and that all these terrible apparatus are being used by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives.There is a well—known incident in one of Moliere’s plays,where the author makes the hero express unbounded delight on being told that he had been talking prose during the whole of his life.In the same way, I trust that you will take comfort,and be delighted with yourselves,on the discovery that you have been acting on the principles of inductive and deductive philosophy during the same period. Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a complex train of reasoning,of the very same kind,though differing in degree,as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.(445 words)