GROUND OF INDUCTION. 343 



The obscurer laws of nature were discovered by means of it, 

 but the more obvious ones must have been understood and as 

 sented to as general truths before it was ever heard of. We 

 should never have thought of affirming that all phenomena 

 take place according to general laws, if we had not first arrived, 

 in the case of a great multitude of phenomena, at some know 

 ledge of the laws themselves ; which could be done no other 

 wise than by induction. In what sense, then, can a principle, 

 which is so far from being our earliest induction, be regarded 

 as our warrant for all the others ? In the only sense, in which 

 (as we have already seen) the general propositions which we 

 place at the head of our reasonings when we throw them into 

 syllogisms, ever really contribute to their validity. As Arch 

 bishop Whately remarks, every induction is a syllogism with 

 the major premise suppressed; or (as I prefer expressing it) 

 every induction may be thrown into the form of a syllogism, 

 by supplying a major premise. If this be actually done, the 

 principle which we are now considering, that of the uniformity 

 of the course of nature, will appear as the ultimate major pre 

 mise of all inductions, and will, therefore, stand to all induc 

 tions in the relation in which, as has been shown at so much 

 length, the major proposition of a syllogism always stands to 

 the conclusion ; not contributing at all to prove it, but being 

 a necessary condition of its being proved ; since no conclu 

 sion is proved, for which there cannot be found a true major 

 premise.* 



* In the first edition a note was appended at this place, containing some 

 criticism on Archbishop Whately s mode of conceiving the relation between 

 Syllogism and Induction. In a subsequent issue of his Logic, the Archbishop 

 made a reply to the criticism, which induced me to cancel part of the note, 

 incorporating the remainder in the text. In a still later edition, the Archbishop 

 observes in a tone of something like disapprobation, that the objections, &quot; doubt 

 less from their being fully answered and found untenable, were silently sup 

 pressed,&quot; and that hence he might appear to some of his readers to be combating 

 a shadow. On this latter point, the Archbishop need give himself no uneasi 

 ness. His readers, I make bold to say, will fully credit his mere affirmation 

 that the objections have actually been made. 



But as he seems to think that what he terms the suppression of the objec 

 tions ought not to have been made &quot;silently,&quot; I now break that silence, and 

 state exactly what it is that I suppressed, and why. I suppressed that alone 



