Five-minute digest
Novum Organon Renovatum
Summary
Novum Organon Renovatum ('The New Organon Renewed') was published in London in 1858 by William Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is the revised second part of his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840; second edition 1847), which for its third edition he divided into three books: the History of Scientific Ideas (1858), this volume on method, and On the Philosophy of Discovery (1860). The title announces the aim. Francis Bacon's Novum Organum of 1620 had tried to give rules for discovering truth before modern science existed; Whewell, having written a history of the sciences from the Greeks to his own day, sets out to draw a method from what discoverers actually did. Like Bacon he gathers his conclusions into numbered aphorisms, each followed by argument. The library text is the complete third edition from Project Gutenberg. Book I collects aphorisms on the fundamental ideas of the sciences (space, time, number, cause, force, likeness, life and others) from the History of Scientific Ideas. Whewell holds that knowledge always has two elements, facts given by the senses and ideas supplied by the mind, and that science advances by joining them. Book II, Of the Construction of Science, describes two processes: the explication of conceptions, by which ideas are made clear and exact, and the colligation of facts, by which a scattered set of observations is bound together under a new conception. Kepler's ellipse for the orbit of Mars is the chief example: the facts were known, but the ellipse was a conception that Kepler 'superinduced' on them. Whewell defends bold hypotheses, tested rigorously, and names three marks of a true theory: it predicts unobserved phenomena, it shows a 'consilience of inductions' when it explains a class of facts it was never designed for, and it grows simpler as it develops. Later chapters give his inductive tables, the distinction between laws of phenomena and causes, the relation of art and science, and a classification of the sciences. Book III treats methods: observation and measurement, the education and discussion that clarify ideas, the steps of induction, and particular methods such as curves, means, least squares, residues, gradation and natural classification. Its last chapter, on the induction of causes, argues that the search for causes leads the mind toward a Supreme Cause. Book IV, Of the Language of Science, reviews technical vocabulary from ancient times through Linnaeus and modern chemistry and lays down rules for coining terms, among them the passage proposing the word 'scientist'.
Top Lessons
Facts need ideas
Whewell argues that observations alone are 'insulated and unconnected' until a discoverer supplies a conception that binds them. The planets' positions were known before Kepler, but the ellipse came from his mind. Knowledge is a union of what we receive and what we contribute.
Guess boldly, test strictly
Against those who said science should avoid hypotheses, Whewell holds that discovery depends on many trial guesses, as Kepler's notebooks show. What makes a discoverer careful is not refusing to guess but comparing each guess rigorously with the facts and rejecting what fails.
Consilience as a mark of truth
Whewell's strongest test of a theory is consilience: an explanation built for one class of facts turns out, unexpectedly, to explain a quite different class. He thought no false supposition could so 'leap to the same point' by accident.
Words for new knowledge
Book IV shows Whewell's conviction that clear thought needs clear terms. He gives rules for coining scientific words and offers 'scientist' as a general name for those who cultivate science, on the analogy of 'artist'.
Verified Quotes
“MAN is the Interpreter of Nature, Science the right interpretation.”
“For an Art of Discovery is not possible.”
“The process of scientific discovery is cautious and rigorous, not by abstaining from hypotheses, but by rigorously comparing hypotheses with facts, and by resolutely rejecting all which the comparison does not confirm.”
“It is a test of true theories not only to account for, but to predict phenomena.”
“The pearls are there, but they will not hang together till some one provides the String.”
“To try wrong guesses is, with most persons, the only way to hit upon right ones.”
“That rules springing from remote and unconnected quarters should thus leap to the same point”
“We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general.”
Medical Lens
Whewell's subject is method in the physical sciences, but Book I includes aphorisms on biology that bear on the history of physiology and medicine. He argues that life cannot be reduced to mechanical or chemical forces, treats vital powers as a fundamental idea, distinguishes voluntary, reflex and instinctive motions, and holds that the very idea of disease presupposes final causes in organization, since disease is a state in which vital forces fail of their proper ends. These are statements of a mid-Victorian vitalist position that later physiology, notably Claude Bernard's, approached differently. His methods of natural classification and of means also bear on later nosology and medical statistics, though he does not apply them to medicine.
- Book I, Aphorisms CI-CIII
Life as a system of vital forces, irreducible to mechanical or chemical forces; digestion and the motion of the blood as examples.
- Book I, Aphorism CIV
Distinction between voluntary, reflex and instinctive motions in terms of sensations, ideas and actions.
- Book I, Aphorisms CV-CVI
Final causes in organized bodies, and disease as a state in which the vital forces do not attain their proper ends.