EVIDENCE OF UNIVERSAL CAUSATION. 403 



tion, as not less certain, but on the contrary, more so, than any of those from 

 which it was drawn. It adds to them as much proof as it receives from 

 them. For there is probably no one even of the best established laws of 

 causation which is not sometimes counteracted, and to which, therefore, 

 apparent exceptions do not present themselves, which would have neces- 

 sarily and justly shaken the confidence of mankind in the universality of 

 those laws, if inductive processes founded on the universal law had not 

 enabled us to refer those exceptions to the agency of counteracting causes, 

 and thereby reconcile them with the law with which they apparently con- 

 flict. Errors, moreover, may have slipped into the statement of any one 

 of the special laws, through inattention to some material circumstance : and 

 instead of the true proposition, another may have been enunciated, false as 

 a universal law, though leading, in all cases hitherto observed, to the same 

 result. To the law of causation, on the contrary, we not only do not know 

 of any exception, but the exceptions which limit or apparently invalidate 

 the special laws, are so far from contradicting the universal one, that they 

 confirm it ; since in all cases which are sufficiently open to our observation, 

 we are able to trace the difference of result, either to the absence of a cause 

 which had been present in ordinary cases, or to the presence of one which 

 had been absent. 



The law of cause and effect, being thus certain, is capable of imparting 

 its certainty to all other inductive propositions which can be deduced from 

 it; and the narrower inductions may be regarded as receiving their ulti- 

 mate sanction from that law, since there is no one of them which is not 

 rendered more certain than it was before, when we are able to connect it 

 with that larger induction, and to show that it can not be denied, consist- 

 ently with the law that every thing which begins to exist has a cause. 

 And hence we are justified in the seeming inconsistency, of holding induc- 

 tion by simple enumeration to be good for proving this general truth, the 

 foundation of scientific induction, and yet refusing to rely on it for any of 

 the narrower inductions. I fully admit that if the law of causation were 

 unknown, generalization in the more obvious cases of uniformity in phe- 

 nomena would nevertheless be possible, and though in all cases more or 

 less precarious, and in some extremely so, would suffice to constitute a cer- 

 tain measure of probability ; but what the amount of this probability might 

 be, we are dispensed from estimating, since it never could amount to the 

 degree of assurance which the proposition acquires, when, by the applica- 

 tion to it of the Four Methods, the supposition of its falsity is shown to 

 be inconsistent with the Law of Causation. We are therefore logically 

 entitled, and, by the necessities of scientific induction, required, to disre- 

 gard the probabilities derived from the early rude method of generalizing, 

 and to consider no minor generalization as proved except so far as the law 

 of causation confirms it, nor probable except so far as it may reasonably 

 be expected to be so confirmed. 



§ 4. The assertion, that our inductive processes assume the law of causa- 

 tion, while the law of causation is itself a case of induction, is a paradox, 

 only on the old theory of reasoning, which supposes the universal truth, or 

 major premise, in a ratiocination, to be the real proof of the particular 

 truths which are ostensibly inferred from it. According to the doctrine 

 maintained in the present treatise,* the major premise is not the proof of 



* Book ii., chap. iii. 



