GROUND OF INDUCTION. 343 



The obscurer laws of nature were discovered by means of it, 

 but the more obvious ones must have been understood and as- 

 sented to as general truths before it was ever heard of. We 

 should never have thought of affirming that all phenomena 

 take place according to general laws, if we had not first arrived, 

 in the case of a great multitude of phenomena, at some know- 

 ledge of the laws themselves ; which could be done no other- 

 wise than by induction. In what sense, then, can a principle, 

 which is so far from being our earliest induction, be regarded 

 as our warrant for all the others ? In the only sense, in which 

 (as we have already seen) the general propositions which we 

 place at the head of our reasonings when we throw them into 

 syllogisms, ever really contribute to their validity. As Arch- 

 bishop Whately remarks, every induction is a syllogism with 

 the major premise suppressed ; or (as I prefer expressing it) 

 every induction may be thrown into the form of a syllogism, 

 by supplying a major premise. If this be actually done, the 

 principle which we are now considering, that of the uniformity 

 of the course of nature, will appear as the ultimate major pre- 

 mise of all inductions, and will, therefore, stand to all induc- 

 tions in the relation in which, as has been shown at so much 

 length, the major proposition of a syllogism always stands to 

 the conclusion ; not contributing at all to prove it, but being 

 a necessary condition of its being proved ; since no conclu- 

 sion is proved, for which there cannot be found a true major 

 premise.* 



* In the first edition a note was appended at this place, containing some 

 criticism on Archbishop Whately 's mode of conceiving the relation between 

 Syllogism and Induction. In a subsequent issue of his Logic, the Archbishop 

 made a reply to the criticism, which induced me to cancel part of the note, 

 incorporating the remainder in the text. In a still later edition, the Archbishop 

 observes in a tone of something like disapprobation, that the objections, " doubt- 

 less from their being fully answered and found untenable, were silently sup- 

 pressed," and that hence he might appear to some of his readers to be combating 

 a shadow. On this latter point, the Archbishop need give himself no uneasi- 

 ness. His readers, I make bold to say, will fully credit his mere affirmation 

 that the objections have actually been made. 



But as he seems to think that what he terms the suppression of the objec- 

 tions ought not to have been made "silently," I now break that silence, and 

 state exactly what it is that I suppressed, and why. I suppressed that alone 



