once admitted in the present day by all but a very few that the source of all scientific knowledge of this kind is to be found in the observations of the senses, including under that word both the bodily senses which tell us all we know of things external, and that internal sense by which we know all or nearly all that takes place within the mind itself.  And so also will it be admitted that the Supreme Postulate, without which scientific knowledge is impossible, is the Uniformity of Nature.

Science lays claim to no revelations.  No voice of authority declares what substances there are in the world, what are the properties of those substances, what are the effects and operations of those properties.  No traditions handed down from past ages can do anything more than transmit to us observations made in those times, which, so far as we can trust them, we may add to the observations made in our own times.  The materials in short which Science has to handle are obtained by experience.

But on the other hand Science can deal with these materials only on the condition that they are reducible to invariable laws.  If any observation made by the senses is not capable of being brought under the laws which are found to govern all other observations, it is not yet brought under the dominion of Science.  It is not yet explained, nor understood.  As far as Science is concerned, it may be called as yet non-existent.  It is for this very reason possible that the examination of it may be of the very greatest importance.  To explain what has hitherto received no explanation constitutes the very essence of scientific progress.  The observation may be imperfect, and may at once become explicable as soon as it is made complete; or, what is of far more value, it may be an instance of the operation of a new law not previously known, modifying and perhaps absorbing the law up to that time accepted.  When it was first noticed in Galileo’s time that water would not ascend in the suction pipe of a pump to a greater height than 32 feet, the old law that nature abhors a vacuum was modified, and the reasons why and the conditions under which Nature abhors a vacuum were discovered.  The suction of fluids was brought under the general law of mechanical pressure.  The doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum had been a fair generalization and expression of the facts of this kind that up to that time had been observed.  A new fact was observed which would not fall under the rule.  The examination of this fact led to the old rule being superseded; and Science advanced a great step at once.  So in our own day was the planet Neptune discovered by the observation of certain facts which could not be squared with the facts previously observed unless the Law of Gravitation was to be corrected.  The result in this case was not the discovery of a new Law but of a new Planet; and consequently a great confirmation of the old Law.  But in each case and in every similar case the investigation of the newly observed fact proceeds on the assumption that Nature will be found uniform, and on no other assumption can Science proceed at all.