200 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



circumstances, and arrived at the more general conception 

 which Europeans associate with the term. 



These brief remarks contain, I believe, all that is well- 

 grounded in the doctrine, that the conception by which the 

 mind arranges and gives unity to phenomena must be fur- 

 nished by the mind itself, and that we find the right concep- 

 tion by a tentative process, trying first one and then another 

 until we hit the mark. The conception is not furnished by 

 the mind until it has been furnished to the mind ; and the 

 facts which supply it are sometimes extraneous facts, but more 

 often the very facts which we are attempting to arrange by it. 

 It is quite true, however, that in endeavouring to arrange the 

 facts, at whatever point we begin, we never advance three 

 steps without forming a general conception, more or less dis- 

 tinct and precise ; and that this general conception becomes 

 the clue which we instantly endeavour to trace through the 

 rest of the facts, or rather, becomes the standard with which 

 we thenceforth compare them. If we are not satisfied with the 

 agreements which we discover among the phenomena by com- 

 paring them with this type, or with some still more general 

 conception which by an additional stage of abstraction we can 

 form from the type ; we change our path, and look out for 

 other agreements : we recommence the comparison from a dif- 

 ferent starting-point, and so generate a different set of general 

 conceptions. This is the tentative process which Dr. Whewell 

 speaks of ; and which has not unnaturally suggested the theory, 

 that the conception is supplied by the mind itself : since the 

 different conceptions which the mind successively tries, it 

 either already possessed from its previous experience, or they 

 were supplied to it in the first stage of the corresponding act 

 of comparison ; so that, in the subsequent part of the process, 

 the conception manifested itself as something compared with 

 the phenomena, not evolved from them. 



4. If this be a correct account of the instrumentality of 

 general conceptions in the comparison which necessarily pre- 

 cedes Induction, we shall easily be able to translate into our 

 own language what Dr. Whewell means by saying that con- 



