William Stanley Jevons’s The Principles of Science (1874) is the Victorian era’s most ambitious account of how science actually reasons: identity and difference, the logic of induction, the theory of probability, measurement, hypothesis and the ‘anticipation of nature’ — with Jevons’s logical machine and his substitution principle at the centre.
It shaped philosophy of science for decades and remains bracingly modern on probability and inference. Download the free EPUB for the full machinery of scientific method, Victorian edition.