404 INDUCTION. 



the conclusion, but is itself proved, along with the conclusion from the 

 same evidence. " All men are mortal " is not the proof that Lord Palraer- 

 ston is mortal ; but our past experience of mortality authorizes us to infer 

 hoth the general truth and the particular fact, and the one with exactly the 

 same degree of assui*ance as the other. The mortality of Lord Palmerston 

 is not an inference from the mortality of all men, but from the experience 

 which proves the mortality of all men ; and is a correct inference from ex- 

 perience, if that general truth is so too. This relation between our general 

 beliefs and their particular applications holds equally true in the more com- 

 prehensive case which we are now discussing. Any new fact of causation 

 inferred by induction, is rightly inferred, if no other objection can be made 

 to the inference than can be made to the general truth that every event has 

 a cause. The utmost certainty which can be given to a conclusion arrived 

 at in the way of inference, stops at this point. When we have ascertained 

 that the particular conclusion must stand or fall with the general uniform- 

 ity of the laws of nature — that it is liable to no doubt except the doubt 

 whether every event has a cause — we have done all that can be done for it. 

 The strongest assurance we can obtain of any theory respecting the cause 

 of a given phenomenon, is that the phenomenon has either that cause or 

 none. 



The latter supposition might have been an admissible one in a very early 

 period of our study of nature. But we have been able to perceive that in 

 the stage which mankind have now reached, the generalization which gives 

 the Law of Universal Causation has grown into a stronger and better in- 

 duction, one deserving of greater reliance, than any of the subordinate gen- 

 eralizations. We may even, I think, go a step further than this, and regard 

 the certainty of that great induction as not merely comparative, but, for all 

 practical purposes, complete. 



The considerations, which, as I apprehend, give, at the present day, to the 

 proof of the law of uniformity of succession as true of all phenomena with- 

 out exception, this character of completeness and conclusiveness, are the 

 following : First, that we now know it directly to be true of far the great- 

 est number of phenomena ; that there are none of which we know it not to 

 be true, the utmost that can be said being, that of some we can not positive- 

 ly from direct evidence affirm its truth ; while phenomenon after phenome- 

 non, as they become better known to us, are constantly passing from the 

 latter class into the former ; and in all cases in which that transition has 

 not yet taken place, the absence of direct proof is accounted for by the rar- 

 ity or the obscurity of the phenomena, our deficient means of observing 

 them, or the logical difficulties arising from the complication of the circum- 

 stances in which they occur; insomuch that, notwithstanding as rigid a 

 dependence on given conditions as exists in the case of any other phenome- 

 non, it was not likely that we should be better acquainted with those con- 

 ditions than we are. Besides this first class of considerations, there is a 

 second, which still further corroborates the conclusion. Although there are 

 phenomena the production and changes of which elude all our attempts to 

 reduce them universally to any ascertained law ; yet in every such case, the 

 phenomenon, or the objects concerned in it, are found in some instances to 

 obey the known laws of nature. The wind, for example, is the type of un- 

 certainty and caprice, yet we find it in some cases obeying with as much 

 constancy as any phenomenon in nature the law of the tendency of fluids 

 to distribute themselves so as to equalize the pressure on every side of each 

 of their particles ; as in the case of the trade-winds and the monsoons. 



