212 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



is natural, and scientifically indispensable. It is, indeed, 

 in a majority of cases, rendered necessary by mere distance 

 of time. The experience by which we are to guide our judg- 

 ments may be other people's experience, little of which can 

 be communicated to us otherwise than by language : when 

 it is our own, it is generally experience long past ; unless, 

 therefore, it were recorded by means of artificial signs, little 

 of it (except in cases involving our intenser sensations or 

 emotions, or the subjects of our daily and hourly contempla- 

 tion) would be retained in the memory. It is hardly necessary 

 to add, that when the inductive inference is of any but the 

 most direct and obvious nature when it requires several 

 observations or experiments, in varying circumstances, and the 

 comparison of one of these with another it is impossible to 

 proceed a step, without the artificial memory which words 

 bestow. Without words, we should, if we had often seen A 

 and B in immediate and obvious conjunction, expect B when- 

 ever we saw A; but to discover their conjunction when not 

 obvious, or to determine whether it is really constant or only 

 casual, and whether there is reason to expect it under any 

 given change of circumstances, is a process far too complex to 

 be performed without some contrivance to make our remem- 

 brance of our own mental operations accurate. Now, language 

 is such a contrivance. When that instrument is called to our 

 aid, the difficulty is reduced to that of making our remem- 

 brance of the meaning of words accurate. This being secured, 

 whatever passes through our minds may be remembered 

 accurately, by putting it carefully into words, and committing 

 the words either to writing or to memory. 



The function of Naming, and particularly of General 

 Names, in Induction, may be recapitulated as follows. Every 

 inductive inference which is good at all, is good for a whole 

 class of cases: and, that the inference may have any better 

 warrant of its correctness than the mere clinging together 

 of two ideas, a process of experimentation and comparison 

 is necessary ; in which the whole class of cases must be 

 brought to view, and some uniformity in the course of nature 

 evolved and ascertained, since the existence of such an uni- 



