UNIFORMITIES YET TO BE DISCOVERED. 153 



men that knowledge of these generalizations which has been 

 hitherto confined to the few. And as fast as this diffusion 

 goes on, must the belief of the scientific become the belief of 

 the world at large. 



That law is universal, will become an irresistible con 

 clusion when it is perceived that the progress in the dis 

 covery of laics itself conforms to law ; and when this percep 

 tion makes it clear why certain groups of phenomena have 

 been reduced to law, while other groups are still unreduced. 

 When it is seen that the order in which uniformities are 

 recognized, must depend upon the frequency and vividness 

 with which they are repeated in conscious experience ; when 

 it is seen that, as a matter of fact, the most common, impor 

 tant, conspicuous, concrete, and simple, uniformities were the 

 earliest recognized, because they were experienced oftenest 

 and most distinctly ; it will by implication be seen that long 

 after the great m,ass of phenomena have been generalized, 

 there must remain phenomena which, from their rareness, 

 or unobtrusiveness, or seeming unimportance, or complexity, 

 or abstractness, are still ungeneralized. Thus will be 



furnished a solution to a difficulty sometimes raised. When 

 it is asked why the universality of law is not already fully 

 established, there will be the answer that the directions in 

 which it is not yet established are those in which its estab 

 lishment must necessarily be latest. That state of things 

 which is inferable beforehand, is just the state which we find 

 to exist. If such coexistences and sequences as those of 

 Biology and Sociology are not yet reduced to law, the pre 

 sumption is not that they arc irreducible to law, but that their 

 laws elude our present means of analysis. Having long ago 

 proved uniformity throughout all the lower classes of rela 

 tions, and having been step by step proving uniformity 

 throughout classes of relations successively higher and higher, 

 if we have not yet succeeded with the highest classes, it may 



