FALLACIES OF GENERALIZATION. 363 



large exceptions ; and even if these could be got rid of, either 

 by disputing the facts or by explaining and limiting the 

 theory, the general objection remains valid against the sup- 

 posed law, as applicable to any other than what, in our third 

 book, were termed Adjacent Cases. For not only is it no 

 ultimate, but not even a causal law. Changes do indeed take 

 place in human affairs, but every one of those changes depends 

 on determinate causes; the " progressiveness of the species" 

 is not a cause, but a summary expression for the general result 

 of all the causes. So soon as, by a quite different sort of induc- 

 tion, it shall be ascertained what causes have produced these 

 successive changes, from the beginning of history, in so far 

 as they have really taken place, and by what causes of a con- 

 trary tendency they have been occasionally checked or entirely 

 counteracted, we may then be prepared to predict the future 

 with reasonable foresight; we may be in possession of the 

 real law of the future ; and may be able to declare on what 

 circumstances the continuance of the same onward movement 

 will eventually depend. But this it is the error of many of the 

 more advanced thinkers, in the present age, to overlook ; and 

 to imagine that the empirical law collected from a mere com- 

 parison of the condition of our species at different past times, 

 is a real law, is the law of its changes, not only past but also 

 to come. The truth is, that the causes on which the pheno- 

 mena of the moral world depend, are in every age, and almost 

 in every country, combined in some different proportion ; so 

 that it is scarcely to be expected that the general result of 

 them all should conform very closely, in its details at least, to 

 any uniformly progressive series. And all generalizations 

 which affirm that mankind have a tendency to grow better or 

 worse, richer or poorer, more cultivated or more barbarous, 

 that population increases faster than subsistence, or subsis- 

 tence than population, that inequality of fortune has a ten- 

 dency to increase or to break down, and the like, propositions 

 of considerable value as empirical laws within certain (but 

 generally rather narrow) limits, are in reality true or false 

 according to times and circumstances. 



What we have said of empirical generalizations from times 



