508 INDUCTION. 



action, and those properties of outward things by which the 

 actions of human beings in society are determined. Some of 

 these general truths will naturally be obtained by observation 

 and experiment, others by deduction : the more complex laws 

 of human action, for example, may be deduced from the 

 simpler ones ; but the simple or elementary laws will always, 

 and necessarily, have been obtained by a directly inductive 

 process. 



To ascertain, then, the laws of each separate cause which 

 takes a share in producing the effect, is the first desideratum 

 of the Deductive Method. To know what the causes are, 

 which must be subjected to this process of study, may or may 

 not be difficult. In the case last mentioned, this first condi- 

 tion is of easy fulfilment. That social phenomena depend on 

 the acts and mental impressions of human beings, never could 

 have been a matter of any doubt, however imperfectly it may 

 have been known either by what laws those impressions 

 and actions are governed, or to what social consequences their 

 laws naturally lead. Neither, again, after physical science 

 had attained a certain development, could there be any real 

 doubt where to look for the laws on which the phenomena of 

 life depend, since they must be the mechanical and chemical 

 laws of the solid and fluid substances composing the organized 

 body and the medium in which it subsists, together with the 

 peculiar vital laws of the different tissues constituting the 

 organic structure. In other cases, really far more simple than 

 these, it was much less obvious in what quarter the causes 

 were to be looked for : as in the case of the celestial pheno- 

 mena. Until, by combining the laws of certain causes, it was 

 found that those laws explained all the facts which experience 

 had proved concerning the heavenly motions, and led to pre- 

 dictions which it always verified, mankind never knew that 

 those were the causes. But whether we are able to put the 

 question before, or not until after, we have become capable of 

 answering it, in either case it must be answered ; the laws of 

 the different causes must be ascertained, before we can proceed 

 to deduce from them the conditions of the effect. 



The mode of ascertaining those laws neither is, nor can be, 



