Scientifi c Methods 313men of science also expressed some dissatisfaction with Baconian- style
rhetoric, sometimes adding analogical reasoning to induction beginning
in the 1820s. But, as historian of science George Daniels has written,
their concerns “brought only ‘reinterpretations’ or ‘natural extensions’;
it never brought acknowledged abandonment or even serious question-
ing.”^17 Only a very few contemporaries, such as the British poet and artist
William Blake, rejected Bacon and his inductive method outright.
Invocations of facts, induction, and Bacon also circulated widely, be-
coming common features of public culture. Such catchwords particularly
saturated popular sciences, including phrenology—in its most typical
form, the belief that the relative sizes of organs in the brain, visible in
the shape of the skull, determined personality and character. Itinerant
phrenological lecturers and inexpensive phrenological literature did a
great deal to spread scientifi c rhetoric, including talk about method. In
his later years Mark Twain recalled the frequent visits of Orson Fowler,
one of the most active of American phrenologists, to his boyhood home of
Hannibal, Missouri, where Fowler’s lectures and head examinations were
“popular and always welcomed” and where people began to use phreno-
logical terms themselves, batting them “back and forth in conversation
with deep satisfaction.”^18
Phrenology also encountered resistance, often from critics invested
in the status quo. In defense of their favorite science, advocates routinely
declared that phrenology was “demonstrated CHIEFLY BY A WORLD OF
PHYSICAL FACTS.” Like all the “exact sciences” it was “discovered, and
brought to its present state of perfection entirely by induction.”^19 Elsewhere,
its defenders relied on the name of Lord Bacon, noting that phrenology
had been “perfected, by the true Baconian method” or rested securely
“on the canons of the Baconial philosophy.”^20 Detractors did not dispute
the phrenologists’ vision of method but rather fought them on method-
ological common ground. Paul M. Roget, professor of physiology at the
Royal Institution, asked, “Who will dare to set up his opinion [against]
ascertained facts?” The real issue for Roget and other skeptics regarded
the “reality of these facts on which so much is made to depend,” and the
legitimacy of phrenologists’ inductions. Critics accused phrenologists of
“hasty generalization” when, in other areas of science, “facts must be ac-
cumulated for ages” prior to any conclusions, claiming for themselves the
practice of “masterly induction.”^21
Such similar- sounding claims from enemy camps stressed the fl exibil-
ity of antebellum American methodological rhetoric. A focus on facts and
induction did sometimes come at the expense of what contemporaries
called “theory” or “hypothesis,” a limitation many modern observers have