114 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



(223, p. 99), we may inquire what is the precise role played by the 

 principle of uniformity in every process by which we establish 

 inductively a general physical law : what exactly is its relation 

 to induction? The principle is a standard according to which 

 we generalize, both formally and materially, every abstract rela 

 tion of cause and effect which we discover in the physical uni 

 verse ; it is a rule of the widest generality, the indefinite scope of 

 which we gradually realize by the application of it to wider and 

 wider generalizations in various departments of nature. If we 

 have determined, by the methods of inductive analysis, that a 

 certain kind or species of physical agency, A, is the physical 

 cause of a, we can forthwith generalize our discovery that &quot; A as 

 such is the physical cause of a&quot; by stating that &quot; Whenever and 

 wherever A is operative, there will a be found &quot; ; and in doing 

 this we are only making a special application of the wider prin 

 ciple of uniformity which tells us that &quot;Whatever can be predi 

 cated of a physical cause or nature in the abstract (as causally 

 connected therewith) can be predicated of all instances of that 

 cause or nature &quot;. It is not that the general law of uniformity is 

 reached first, and the narrower law (that &quot;A will produce a&quot;) 

 deduced logically from it. In neither case and indeed in no case 

 is the discovery of a general law a ratiodnative process, a logical 

 inference (197, 212). Inference may have been involved in the 

 subsidiary processes by which we verify the abstract judgment 

 &quot;A as such is the physical cause of a&quot;; but the immediate 

 mental process by which the law is reached is a process of judg 

 ment (following on abstract conception), not a logical inference in 

 the strict sense of a conscious derivation of one judgment from 

 another, or others, which imply the former logically. 1 But if in 

 duction is riot an inference, there can be no meaning in the 

 statement we meet so commonly in logical treatises, that the 

 principle of uniformity is the major premiss whether immediate 

 or remote of every induction? The principle does not help us to 

 reach the abstract -truth connecting cause and effect (&quot; A as such is 

 the physical cause of a &quot;). It is in generalizing the latter (to &quot; All 



1 Cf. JOYCE, op. cit., pp. 217, 227 ; though elsewhere he defines induction as the 

 &quot; legitimate inference of universal laws from individual cases &quot; (p. 215) : he uses the 

 word here, presumably in the wide sense of derivation, not in the sense of a 

 logically &quot;inferential process&quot; in which the principle of uniformity would be a 

 major premiss (p. 218). Cf. supra, 212. 



S C/. Palaestra Logica, p. 130; MELLONE, op. cit., p. 384; MILL, Logic, III., 

 in., i. 



