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ought, in one sense, to be verifiable; that is
to say, it ought to be little more than a ligament of
numberless possible predictions concerning future
experience, so that if they fail, it falls.
Thus, when Schliemann entertained the hypothesis there really had been a city of Troy
and a Trojan War, this meant to his mind among other things that
when he should come to make excavations
at Hissarlik he would probably find remains
of a city with evidences of a civilization
more or less answering to the descriptions of the Iliad, and
which would correspond with other probable
finds at Mycenae, Ithaca, and elsewhere.
So understood, Comte's maxim is sound. Nothing
but that is an explanatory hypothesis. But
Comte's own notion of a verifiable hypothesis