342 INDUCTION. 



the like. One of the most usual of these modes of expression, 

 but also one of the most inadequate, is that which has heen 

 brought into familiar use by the metaphysicians of the school 

 of Reid and Stewart. The disposition of the human mind to 

 generalize from experience, a propensity considered by these 

 philosophers as an instinct of our nature, they usually de 

 scribe under some such name as &quot; our intuitive conviction that 

 the future will resemble the past.&quot; Now it has been well 

 pointed out by Mr. Bailey,* that (whether the tendency be or 

 not an original and ultimate element of our nature), Time, in 

 its modifications of past, present, and future, has no concern 

 either with the belief itself, or with the grounds of it. We 

 believe that fire will burn to-morrow, because it burned to-day 

 and yesterday ; but we believe, on precisely the same grounds, 

 that it burned before we were born, and that it burns this very 

 / day in Cochin-China. It is not from the past to the future, as 

 j past and future, that we infer, but from the known to the un- 

 i known ; from facts observed to facts unobserved ; from what 

 \we have perceived, or been directly conscious of, to what has 

 mot come within our experience. In this last predicament is 

 the whole region of the future; but also the vastly greater 

 portion of the present and of the past. 



Whatever be the most proper mode of expressing it, the 

 proposition that the course of nature is uniform, is the funda 

 mental principle, or general axiom, of Induction. It would yet 

 be a great error to offer this large generalization as any expla 

 nation of the inductive process. On the contrary, I hold it to 

 be itself .an instance of induction, and induction by no means 

 of the most obvious kind. Far from being the first induction 

 we make, it is one of the last, or at all events one of those 

 which are latest in attaining strict philosophical accuracy. As 

 a general maxim, indeed, it has scarcely entered into the minds 

 of any but philosophers ; nor even by them, as we shall have 

 many opportunities of remarking, have its extent and limits 

 been always very justly conceived. The truth is, that this 

 great generalization is itself founded on prior generalizations. 



* Essays on the Pursuit of Truth. 



