Education Quote by Henry Mayhew

Mayhew slices the grand “scientific method” into two workmanlike verbs: using and acquiring. It’s a journalist’s distinction, less ivory-tower than newsroom-floor. Deduction, for him, is what you do once you already have something solid in hand: you apply established principles to a new case, turning knowledge into a tool. Induction is the messier job of getting that knowledge in the first place: collecting particulars, noticing patterns, and risking a generalization. The phrasing quietly demotes deduction from its old perch as the aristocrat of reasoning; it’s not nobler, just later in the process.

The subtext carries the grit of Mayhew’s era and beat. Writing in a century obsessed with classification, social reform, and the legitimacy of “facts,” he knew that information doesn’t descend from theory like scripture. It has to be gathered: in streets, factories, tenements, ledgers, testimony. Induction is labor. It implies legwork, exposure, and the ethical hazard of turning people into data. By contrast, deduction can look clean and authoritative precisely because the dirt has already been scrubbed off upstream.

The intent is also a warning against category errors that still plague public debate: treating deduction as a discovery machine, or treating induction as if it were already certainty. Mayhew’s sentence is compact because it’s trying to discipline the mind. Before you argue from principle, ask where your principles came from. Before you claim “the evidence is in,” admit whether you’re still in the business of acquiring it.