410 INDUCTION. 



had their laws altered, may carry their new laws with them 

 unaltered into their ulterior combinations. And hence there 

 is no reason to despair of ultimately raising chemistry and 

 physiology to the condition of deductive sciences ; for though 

 it is impossible to deduce all chemical and physiological truths 

 from the laws or properties of simple substances or elementary 

 agents, they may possibly be deducible from laws which com 

 mence when these elementary agents are brought together 

 into some moderate number of not very complex combina 

 tions. The Laws of Life will never be deducible from the 

 mere laws of the ingredients, but the prodigiously complex 

 Facts of Life may all be deducible from comparatively simple 

 laws of life ; which laws (depending indeed on combinations, 

 but on comparatively simple combinations, of antecedents) 

 may, in more complex circumstances, be strictly compounded 

 with one another, and with the physical and chemical laws of 

 the ingredients. The details of the vital phenomena, even 

 now, afford innumerable exemplifications of the Composition 

 of Causes ; and in proportion as these phenomena are more 

 accurately studied, there appears more reason to believe that 

 the same laws which operate in the simpler combinations of 

 circumstances do, in fact, continue to be observed in the more 

 complex. This will be found equally true in the phenomena 

 of mind ; and even in social and political phenomena, the 

 results of the laws of mind. It is in the case of chemical 

 phenomena that the least progress has yet been made in 

 bringing the special laws under general ones from which they 

 may be deduced ; but there are even in chemistry many cir 

 cumstances to encourage the hope that such general laws will 

 hereafter be discovered. The different actions of a chemical 

 compound will never, undoubtedly, be found to be the sums 

 of the actions of its separate elements ; but there may exist, 

 between the properties of the compound and those of its 

 elements, some constant relation, which, if discoverable by a 

 sufficient induction, would enable us to foresee the sort of 

 compound which will result from a new combination before 

 we have actually tried it, and to judge of what sort of elements 

 some new substance is compounded before we have analysed 



