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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: as to the science which required the greatest amount of their favourite
geometry: but even that they were content to let pass from its
inductive to its deductive stage--not as we have done now, after two
centuries of inductive search for the true laws, and their final
discovery by Kepler and Newton: but as soon as Hipparchus had
propounded any theory which would do instead of the true laws, content
there to stop their experiments, and return to their favourite work of
commenting, deducing, spinning notion out of notion, ad infinitum.
Still, they were not all of this temper. Had they been, they would have
discovered, not merely a little, but absolutely nothing. For after all,
if we will consider, induction being the right path to knowledge, every
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