Note 852 — Chapter V · (continued 3)

‘He followed his natural inclination. He preferred the more delusive, apparently the more direct, road, which has seduced so many philosophers. He sought to arrive at the general laws of nature at once by conjecture: rather than, by a close and detailed study of her inferior operations, to ascend, step by step, through a slow and gradual induction to those laws which govern her general procedure.’ Babington's Preface to Hunter's Treatise on the Venereal Disease, in Hunter's Works, vol. ii. p. 129. Compare the narrow and carping criticism in Foot's Life of Hunter, p. 163.