Provenance
Source & edition record
This page records where the text came from, what changed in presentation, and what remains unverified.
Bibliographic source
- Work
- On Scientific Method in Philosophy
- Author
- Bertrand Russell
- First publication
- Herbert Spencer Lecture, 1914
- Source edition
- Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959, pp. 97-124
- Accessed
- 2026-08-16
- Verification
- source-compared
- Source snapshot SHA-256
3644c1c3c8d2cb996a72caffbcb9513e2229de66856fe7394544051c98506a29
Transformations
- Removed the Project Gutenberg legal wrapper and the work-specific excluded matter recorded in the source manifest.
- Preserved source wording, spelling, punctuation, order, and plain-text emphasis markers.
- Normalised mechanical whitespace and line wrapping, while preserving diagrams and tables verbatim.
- Added semantic section files, stable routes, source-fragment links, and deterministic anchors.
- Inherited the Project Gutenberg transcription and its documented editorial corrections.
- Converted bracket-number note markers and definitions into stable section-local Markdown footnotes.
- Compared the complete lecture against a 1918 collection scan and the exact 1914 Clarendon pamphlet; retained the frozen 1959 source-edition wording and recorded substantive earlier readings in the public source record.
- Did not expose original-page labels as if the 1959 source text were an exact transcription of the 1914 pamphlet.
Edition collation
The rendered text follows the frozen 1959 source edition. Earlier witnesses were compared in full; genuine readings are disclosed here rather than silently merged or mislabeled as transcription errors.
Witnesses
- Clarendon first publication, 1914: Exact first-publication witness, printed pp. 3-30. PDF SHA-256
8f1d541b15ceeb5bfe045024cd61047fb7d31d1c0f26d454593acffffcc59a70. - Longmans collection, 1918: Early collection witness, printed pp. 97-124. PDF SHA-256
306e3dfe0ffd8d5086095f54b02c2aae331661944be9fc2fecf9c0287b4dc2fe.
Substantive earlier readings
| Location | Earlier witness | Rendered source edition |
|---|---|---|
| 1914 p. 7 | by being merely named | by merely being named |
| 1914 p. 7 | it is obviously fallacious | it is clearly fallacious |
| 1914 p. 9 | Spencer quotation: rational interpretation of phenomena; laws to which manifestations conform; Science, equally with Philosophy, would be impossible | Spencer quotation: rational interpretation of Evolution; causes of Evolution; deductive Science impossible |
| 1914 p. 9 note | First Principles, Part II, beginning of chapter vi | First Principles, Part II, beginning of chapter viii |
| 1914 p. 11 | is now very generally believed | is now generally believed |
| 1914 p. 17 | Such special and accidental facts are irrelevant | Special and accidental facts of this kind are irrelevant |
| 1914 p. 19 | anything from the work of his predecessors | anything definite from the work of his predecessors |
| 1914 p. 20 | the problem of epistemology, however | the problem of theory of knowledge, however |
| 1914 p. 21 | is purely logical | is wholly logical |
| 1914 p. 25 | It is not possible, at any rate if ‘synthetic’ means … | at any rate so far as geometry is concerned, ‘It is not possible,’ if ‘synthetic’ means … |
Rights status
public-domain. Project Gutenberg records the source edition as public domain in the USA. The lecture was first published in 1914. This publication decision applies to US availability; readers elsewhere should check local law. Project Gutenberg’s licence and trademark terms apply to the frozen source artifact. View the rights record ↗