Whenever A is X, if treated with B it is C.

The minor premise is an hypothesis that the preparation contains X. An experiment then treats A with B. If C result, a probability is raised in favour of the hypothesis that A is X; or a certainty, if we know that C results on that condition only.

So important are hypotheses to science, that Whewell insists that they have often been extremely valuable even though erroneous.  Of the Ptolemaic system he says, “We can hardly imagine that Astronomy could, in its outset, have made so great a progress under any other form.”  It served to connect men’s thoughts on the subject and to sustain their interest in working it out; by successive corrections “to save appearances,” it attained at last to a descriptive sort of truth, which was of great practical utility; it also occasioned the invention of technical terms, and, in general digested the whole body of observations and prepared them for assimilation by a better hypothesis in the fulness of time.  Whewell even defends the maxim that “Nature abhors a vacuum,” as having formerly served to connect many facts that differ widely in their first aspect.  “And in reality is it not true,” he asks, “that nature does abhor a vacuum, and does all she can to avoid it?” Let no forlorn cause despair of a champion!  Yet no one has accused Whewell of Quixotry; and the sense of his position is that the human mind is a rather feeble affair, that can hardly begin to think except with blunders.

The progress of science may be plausibly attributed to a process of Natural Selection; hypotheses are produced in abundance and variety, and those unfit to bear verification are destroyed, until only the fittest survive.  Wallace, a practical naturalist, if there ever was one, as well as an eminent theorist, takes the same view as Whewell of such inadequate conjectures.  Of ‘Lemuria,’ an hypothetical continent in the Indian Ocean, once supposed to be traceable in the islands of Madagascar, Seychelles, and Mauritius, its surviving fragments, and named from the Lemurs, its characteristic denizens, he says (Island Life, chap. xix.) that it was “essentially a provisional hypothesis, very useful in calling attention to a remarkable series of problems in geographical distribution [of plants and animals], but not affording the true solution of those problems.”  We see, then, that ’provisional hypotheses,’ or working hypotheses,’ though erroneous, may be very useful or (as Whewell says) necessary.

Hence, to be prolific of hypotheses is the first attribute of scientific genius; the first, because without it no progress whatever can be made.  And some men seem to have a marked felicity, a sort of instinctive judgment even in their guesses, as if their heads were made according to Nature.  But others among the greatest, like Kepler, guess often and are often wrong before they hit upon the truth, and themselves, like Nature, destroy many vain shoots and seedlings of