John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES OF INDUCTION. 67
their repute. An Aberdeen Lecturer on Chemistry, the late
Dr. John Shier (Chemist to the Colony of Demarara), went
carefully over all the chemical examples with me, and struck
out various erroneous statements. I had recently made a study
of Faraday s very stiff papers on Electricity, and from these I
extracted one generalization, somewhat modified by myself,
and this Mill prized very highly ; nevertheless, it was afterwards
carped at by Whewell, as going beyond what Faraday would
have allowed. One way or other, I gave him a large stock of
examples to choose from,
as he revised the Third Book for
press. The difficulty that was most felt was to get .good
examples of the purely _Experiinental Methods. He had
availed himself of the famous research on Dew adduced by
Herschel. There was hardly to be got any other example so
good. For one of his later editions, I gave him the example
from Brown-Sequard, on the cause of Cadaveric Rigidity, and
also used it in my own book. For the Deductive Method, and
the allied subjects of Explanation and Empirical and Derivative
Laws, the examples that we found were abundant. When,
however, I suggested his adopting some from Psychology, he
steadily, and I believe wisely, resisted ; and, if he took any of
these, it was in the Deductive department.
I was so much struck with the view of Induction that re
that I
garded it as reasoning from particulars to particulars,
suggested a farther exemplification of it in detail, and he
inserted two pages of instances that I gave him. On the three
last books, 1 had little to offer. I remember his saying at a
later period, that the Fourth Book (which I have always
regarded as the crude materials of a Logic of Definition and
Classification) was made up of a number of subjects that he
did not know where to place.
The Logic has been about the best attacked book of the
time j and the author has in successive editions replied to
objections and made extensive amendments. I have had
myself full opportunities for expressing both agreements and