Abstract

This is a most remarkable book. Far from being a sequel to Wallace’s Causality and Scientific Explanation, this work is something of a different order altogether. It is more than a century and a half since a similar work was published, William Whewell’s great synoptic work The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Wallace’s plot is not unlike Whewell’s, in that the philosophy of nature each develops is worked in specific applications to the sciences of the day. Whewell called a later version of his book Novum Organon Renovatum. We might call Wallace’s book Novum Organon Iterum Renovatum.