FALLACIES OF GENERALIZATION. 547 



anccs to his senses, or feelings in his internal consciousness, which afforded 

 no warrant for any such belief. A caution, therefore, against this class of 

 errors, is not only needful but indispensable; though to detei-mine wheth- 

 er, on any of the great questions of metaphysics, such errors are actually 

 committed, belongs not to this place, but, as I have so often said, to a dif- 

 ferent science. 



CHAPTER V. 



FALLACIES OF GENERALIZATION. 



§ 1. The class of Fallacies of which we are now to speak, is the most 

 extensive of all ; embracing a greater number and variety of unfounded 

 inferences than any of the other classes, and which it is even more diificult 

 to reduce to sub-classes or species. If the attempt made in the preceding 

 books to define the principles of well-grounded generalization has been 

 successful, all generalizations not conformable to those principles might, 

 in a certain sense, be brought imder the jDresent class ; when, however, the 

 rules are known and kept in view, but a casual lapse committed in the ap- 

 plication of them, this is a blunder, not a fallacy. To entitle an error of 

 generalization to the latter epithet, it must be committed on principle ; 

 there must lie in it some erroneous general conception of the inductive 

 process; the legitimate mode of drawing conclusions from observation and 

 experiment must be fundamentally misconceived. 



Without attempting any thing so chimerical as an exhaustive classifica- 

 tion of all the misconceptions which can exist on the subject, let ns con- 

 tent ourselves with noting, among the cautions which might be suggested, 

 a few of the most useful and needful. 



§ 2. In the first place, there are certain kinds of generalization which, 

 if the principles already laid down be correct, must be groundless ; expe- 

 rience can not afford the necessary conditions for establishing them by a 

 correct induction. Such, for instance, are all inferences from the order of 

 nature existing on the earth, or in the solar system, to that which may 

 exist in remote parts of the universe ; where the phenomena, for aught we 

 know, may be entirely different, or may succeed one another according to 

 different laws, or even according to no fixed law at all. Such, again, in 

 matters dependent on causation, are all universal negatives, all propositions 

 that assert impossibility. The non-existence of any given phenomenon, 

 however uniformly experience may as yet have testified to the fact, proves 

 at most that no cause, adequate to its production, has yet manifested itself ; 

 but that no such causes exist in nature can only be inferred if we are so 

 foolish as to suppose that we know all the forces in nature. The supposi- 

 tion would at least be premature while our acquaintance with some even 

 of those Avhich we do know is so extremely recent. And however much 

 our knowledge of nature may hereafter be extended, it is not easy to see 

 how that knowledge could ever be complete, or how, if it were, we could 

 ever be assured of its being so. 



The only laws of nature which afford suflficient warrant for attributing 

 impossibility (even with reference to the existing order of nature, and to 

 our own region of the universe) are, first, those of number and extension, 

 which are paramount to the laws of the succession of phenomena, and not 

 exposed to the agency of counteracting causes ; and, secondly, the universal 



