PHILOSOPHY OF INDUCTIVE INFERENCE. 251 



tents of our knowledge, except through new impressions 

 upon the senses, or upon some seat of feeling. I shall 

 attempt to show that inference, whether inductive or 

 deductive, is never more than an unfolding of the contents 

 of our experience, and that it always proceeds upon the 

 assumption that the future and the unperceived will be 

 governed by the same conditions as the past and the 

 perceived, an assumption which will often prove to be 

 mistaken. 



In inductive just as in deductive reasoning, the con 

 clusion never passes beyond the premises. Reasoning 

 adds no more to the implicit contents of our knowledge, 

 than the arrangement of the specimens in a museum adds 

 to the number of those specimens. This arrangement adds 

 to our knowledge in a certain sense : it allows us to per 

 ceive the similarities and peculiarities of the individual 

 specimens, and on the assumption that the museum is an 

 adequate representation of nature, it enables us to judge 

 of the prevailing forms of natural objects. Bacon s first 

 aphorism holds perfectly true, that man knows nothing 

 but what he has observed, provided that we include his 

 whole sources of experience, and the whole implicit con 

 tents of his knowledge. Inference but unfolds the hidden 

 meaning of our observations, and the theory of probability 

 shows how far we go beyond our data in assuming that 

 new specimens will resemble the old ones, or that the 

 future may be regarded as proceeding uniformly with the 

 past. 



Various Classes of Inductive Truths. 



It will be desirable, in the first place, to distinguish 

 between the several kinds of truths which we endeavour 

 to establish by induction. Although there is a certain 

 common and universal element in all our processes of 



