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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: hypotheses is revealed in this lecture. He incessantly employed
them to gain experimental ends, but he incessantly took them down,
as an architect removes the scaffolding when the edifice is complete.
'I cannot but doubt,' he says, 'that he who as a mere philosopher
has most power of penetrating the secrets of nature, and guessing by
hypothesis at her mode of working, will also be most careful for his
own safe progress and that of others, to distinguish the knowledge
which consists of assumption, by which I mean theory and hypothesis,
from that which is the knowledge of facts and laws.' Faraday
himself, in fact, was always 'guessing by hypothesis,' and making
theoretic divination the stepping-stone to his experimental results.
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