108 INDUCTION. 



after due examination in any, we are safe in acting on as uni- 

 versal provisionally, until an undoubted exception appears ; 

 provided the nature of the case be such that a real exception 

 could scarcely have escaped our notice. When every phe- 

 nomenon that we ever knew sufficiently well to be able to 

 answer the question, had a cause on which it was invariably 

 consequent, it was more rational to suppose that our inability 

 to assign the causes of other phenomena arose from our igno- 

 rance, than that there were phenomena which were uncaused, 

 and which happened to be exactly those which we had hitherto 

 had no sufficient opportunity of studying. 



It must, at the same time, be remarked, that the reasons 

 for this reliance do not hold in circumstances unknown to us, 

 and beyond the possible range of our experience. In distant 

 parts of the stellar regions, where the phenomena may be 

 entirely unlike those with which we are acquainted, it would 

 be folly to affirm confidently that this general law prevails, 

 any more than those special ones which we have found to hold 

 universally on our own planet. The uniformity in the suc- 

 cession of events, otherwise called the law of causation, must 

 be received not as a law of the universe, but of that portion of 

 it only which is within the range of our means of sure obser- 

 vation, with a reasonable degree of extension to adjacent cases. 

 To extend it further is to make a supposition without evidence, 

 and to which, in the absence of any ground from experience 

 for estimating its degree of probability, it would be idle to 

 attempt to assign any.* 



* One of the most rising thinkers of the new generation in France, M. 

 Taine (who has given, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the most masterly analysis, 

 at least in one point of view, ever made of the present work), though he rejects, on 

 this and similar points of psychology, the intuition theory in its ordinary form 

 nevertheless assigns to the law of causation, and to some other of the most uni- 

 versal laws, that certainty beyond the bounds of human experience, which I 

 have not been able to accord to them. He does this on the faith of our faculty 

 of abstraction, in which he seems to recognise an independent source of evidence, 

 not indeed disclosing truths not contained in our experience, but affording an 

 assurance which experience cannot give, of the universality of those which it 



