LAW OF CAUSATION. 365 



cedents. Let the fact be what it may, if it has begun to exist, 

 it was preceded by some fact or facts, with which it is in- 

 variably connected. For every event there exists some com- 

 bination of objects or events, some given concurrence of cir- 

 cumstances, positive and negative, the occurrence of which 

 is always followed by that phenomenon. We may not have 

 found out what this concurrence of circumstances may be ; but 

 we never doubt that there is such a one, and that it never 

 occurs without having the phenomenon in question as its effect 

 or consequence. On the universality of this truth depends 

 the possibility of reducing the inductive process to rules. The 

 undoubted assurance we have that there is a law to be found 

 if we only knew how to find it, will be seen presently to be 

 the source from which the canons of the Inductive Logic 

 derive their validity. 



3. It is seldom, if ever, between a consequent and a 

 single antecedent, that this invariable sequence subsists. It 

 is usually between a consequent and the sum of several ante- 

 cedents; the concurrence of all of them being requisite to 

 produce, that is, to be certain of being followed by, the con- 

 sequent. In such cases it is very common to single out one 

 only of the antecedents under the denomination of Cause, 

 calling the others merely Conditions. Thus, if a person eats 

 of a particular dish, and dies in consequence, that is, would 

 not have died if he had not eaten of it, people would be apt 

 to say that eating of that dish was the cause of his death. 

 There needs not, however, be any invariable connexion between 

 eating of the dish and death ; but there certainly is, among 

 the circumstances which took place, some combination or other 

 on which death is invariably consequent : as, for instance, the 

 act of eating of the dish, combined with a particular bodily 

 constitution, a particular state of present health, and perhaps 

 even a certain state of the atmosphere ; the whole of which 

 circumstances perhaps constituted in this particular case the 

 conditions of the phenomenon, or, in other words, the set of 

 antecedents which determined it, and but for which it would 

 not have happened. The real Cause, is the whole of these 



