CHAPTEE XXIV. 



OF THE REMAINING LAWS OF NATURE. 



1. Ix the First Book, wo found that all the assertions 

 which can be conveyed by language, express some one or 

 more of five different things: Existence; Order in Place; 

 Order in Time; Causation; and Resemblance.* Of these, 

 Causation, in our view of the subject, not being fundamentally 

 different from Order in Time, the five species of possible 

 assertions are reduced to four. The propositions which affirm 

 Order in Time, in either of its two modes, Coexistence and 

 Succession, have formed, thus far, the subject of the present 

 Book. And we have now concluded the exposition, so far as 

 it falls within the limits assigned to this work, of the nature 

 of the evidence on which these propositions rest, and the pro 

 cesses of investigation by which they are ascertained and 

 proved. There remain three classes of facts : Existence, Order 

 in Place, and Resemblance ; in regard to which the same 

 questions are now to be resolved. 



Regarding the first of these, very little needs be said. 

 Existence in general, is a subject not for our science, but for 

 metaphysics. To determine what things can be recognised as 

 really existing, independently of our own sensible or other 

 impressions, and in what meaning the term is, in that case, 

 predicated of them, belongs to the consideration of &quot; Things 

 in themselves,&quot; from which, throughout this work, we have as 

 much as possible kept aloof. Existence, so far as Logic is 

 concerned about it, has reference only to phenomena; to 

 actual, or possible, states of external or internal consciousness, 

 in ourselves or others. Feelings of sensitive beings, or possi 

 bilities of having such feelings, are the only things the exist- 



* Supra, vol. i. p. 115. 



