198 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



quite justified in designating as one of the principal obstacles 

 to good induction, general conceptions wrongly formed, 

 "notiones temere a rebus abstracts :" to wbicb Dr. Whewell 

 adds, that not only does bad abstraction make bad induction, 

 but that in order to perform induction well, we must have 

 abstracted well ; our general conceptions must be " clear" and 

 " appropriate" to the matter in hand. 



3. In attempting to show what the difficulty in this 

 matter really is, and how it is surmounted, I must beg the 

 reader, once for all, to bear this in mind ; that although in dis- 

 cussing the opinions of a different school of philosophy, I am 

 willing to adopt their language, and to speak, therefore, of con- 

 necting facts through the instrumentality of a conception, this 

 technical phraseology means neither more nor less than what 

 is commonly called comparing the facts with one another and 

 determining in what they agree. Nor has the technical ex- 

 pression even the advantage of being metaphysically correct. 

 The facts are not connected, except in a merely metaphorical 

 acceptation of the term. The ideas of the facts may become 

 connected, that is, we may be led to think of them together ; 

 but this consequence is no more than what may be produced 

 by any casual association. What really takes place, is, I con- 

 ceive, more philosophically expressed by the common word 

 Comparison, than by the phrases "to connect" or "to super- 

 induce." For, as the general conception is itself obtained by 

 a comparison of particular phenomena, so, when obtained, the 

 mode in which we apply it to other phenomena is again by 

 comparison. We compare phenomena with each other to get 

 the conception, and we then compare those and other pheno- 

 mena with the conception. We get the conception of an animal 

 (for instance) by comparing different animals, and when we 

 afterwards see a creature resembling an animal, we compare it 

 with our general conception of an animal ; and if it agrees 

 with that general conception, we include it in the class. The 

 conception becomes the type of comparison. 



And we need only consider what comparison is, to see that 

 where the objects are more than two, and still more when 



