98 INDUCTION. 



truth of the belief would not follow; it would only follow 

 that mankind were under a permanent necessity of believing 

 what might possibly not be true ; in other words, that a case 

 might occur in which our senses or consciousness, if they 

 could be appealed to, might testify one thing, and our reason 

 believe another. But in fact there is no such permanent 

 necessity. There is no proposition of which it can be asserted 

 that every human mind must eternally and irrevocably believe 

 it. Many of the propositions of which this is most confidently 

 stated, great numbers of human beings have disbelieved. The 

 things which it has been supposed that nobody could possibly 

 help believing, are innumerable ; but no two generations 

 would make out the same catalogue of them. One age or 

 nation believes implicitly what to another seems incredible 

 and inconceivable ; one individual has not a vestige of a 

 belief which another deems to be absolutely inherent in 

 humanity. There is not one of these supposed instinctive 

 beliefs which is really inevitable. It is in the power of every 

 one to cultivate habits of thought which make him inde- 

 pendent of them. The habit of philosophical analysis, (of 

 which it is the surest effect to enable the mind to command, 

 instead of being commanded by, the laws of the merely passive 

 part of its own nature,) by showing to us that things are not 

 necessarily connected in fact because their ideas are connected 

 in our minds, is able to loosen innumerable associations which 

 reign despotically over the undisciplined or early-prejudiced 

 mind. And this habit is not without power even over those 

 associations which the school of which I have been speaking 

 regard as connate and instinctive. I am convinced that any 

 one accustomed to abstraction and analysis, who will fairly 

 exert his faculties for the purpose, will, when his imagination 

 has once learnt to entertain the notion, find no difficulty in 

 conceiving that in some one for instance of the many firma- 

 ments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, 

 events may succeed one another at random, without any fixed 

 law ; nor can anything in our experience, or in our mental 

 nature, constitute a sufficient, or indeed any, reason for be- 

 lieving that this is nowhere the case. 



