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INDUCTION. 



At present it is of more importance to understand thoroughly 

 the import of the axiom itself. For the proposition, that the 

 course of nature is uniform, possesses rather the brevity suit- 

 able to popular, than the precision requisite in philosophical 

 language : its terms require to be explained, and a stricter 

 than their ordinary signification given to them, before the truth 

 of the assertion can be admitted. 



2. Every person's consciousness assures him that he 

 does not always expect uniformity in the course of events ; he 

 does not always believe that the unknown will be similar to 

 the known, that the future will resemble the past. Nobody 

 believes that the succession of rain and fine weather will be 

 the same in every future year as in the present. Nobody ex- 

 pects to have the same dreams repeated every night. On the 

 contrary, everybody mentions it as something extraordinary, 

 if the course of nature is constant, and resembles itself, in these 

 particulars. To look for constancy where constancy is not to 

 be expected, as for instance that a day which has once brought 

 good fortune will always be a fortunate day, is justly accounted 

 superstition. 



The course of nature, in truth, is not only uniform, it is 

 also infinitely various. Some phenomena are always seen to 

 recur in the very same combinations in which we met with 

 them at first ; others seem altogether capricious ; while some, 

 which we had been accustomed to regard as bound down ex- 

 clusively to a particular set of combinations, we unexpectedly 

 find detached from some of the elements with which we had 

 hitherto found them conjoined, and united to others of quite 

 a contrary description. To an inhabitant of Central Africa, 

 fifty years ago, no fact probably appeared to rest on more 

 uniform experience than this, that all human beings are 

 black. To Europeans, not many years ago, the proposition, 

 All swans are white, appeared an equally unequivocal instance 

 of uniformity in the course of nature. Further experience has 

 proved to both that they were mistaken ; but they had to wait 

 fifty centuries for this experience. During that long time, 



