Abstract
I HASTEN to reassure Capt. Hume. No right-minded anthropologist would regard the argument framed by him as scientific. A science need not be judged by its camp followers and aberrant devotees. Mathematical demonstration is possible only in proportion to the degree of abstraction. The criterion of proof in each science depends upon the character of its subject matter and the potentialities of the methods which that subject matter admits. To estimate the conclusiveness of a proof, apart from the general rules of logic, in any given subject must therefore, to a considerable extent, depend upon knowledge and training. Capt. Hume's example is not well chosen. The connexion between Christianity and Mithraism, as well as other forms of paganism, is dependent not upon one or two resemblances, which might be fortuitous, but upon a series of similarities sufficiently close to warrant their being regarded as identities, quite apart from the admission of the early Christian Church that borrowing and assimilation had taken place.
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The Methodology of the Inexact Sciences. Nature 123, 130 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/123130a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/123130a0
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