550 FALLACIES. 



his tantummodo qum prcesto sunt pronuncians, is the sole evidence. Their 

 fallacy consists in this, that they are inductions without elimination : there 

 has been no real comparison of instances, nor even ascertainment of the 

 material facts in any given instance. There is also the further error, of 

 forgetting that such generalizations, even if well established, could not be 

 ultimate truths, but must be results of laws much more elementary ; and 

 therefore, until deduced from such, could at most be admitted as empirical 

 laws, holding good within the limits of space and time by which the partic- 

 ular observations that suggested the generalization were bounded. 



This error, of placing mere empirical laws, and laws in which there is no 

 direct evidence of causation, on the same footing of certainty as laws of 

 cause and effect, an error which is at the root of perhaps the greater num- 

 ber of bad inductions, is exemplified only in its grossest form in the kind 

 of generalizations to which we have now referred. These, indeed, do not 

 possess even the degree of evidence which pertains to a well-ascertained 

 empirical law ; but admit of refutation on the empirical ground itself, with- 

 out ascending to casual laws. A little reflection, indeed, will show that 

 mere negations can only form the ground of the lowest and least valuable 

 kind of empirical law. A phenomenon has never been noticed ; this only 

 pi-oves that the conditions of that phenomenon have not yet occurred in ex- 

 perience, but does not prove that they may not occur hereafter. There is 

 a better kind of empirical law than this, namely, when a phenomenon which 

 is observed pi-esents within the limits of observation a series of gradations, 

 in which a regularity, or something like a mathematical law, is perceptible; 

 from which, therefore, something may be rationally presumed as to those 

 terms of the series which are beyond the limits of observation. But in ne- 

 gation there ai'e no gradations, and no series ; the generalizations, therefore, 

 Avhich deny the possibility of any given condition of man and. society merely 

 because it has never yet been witnessed, can not possess this higher degree 

 of validity even as empirical laws. What is more, the minuter examination 

 which that higher order of empirical laws presupposes, being applied to 

 the subject-matter of these, not only does not confirm but actually refutes 

 them. For in reality the past history of Man and Society, instead of ex- 

 hibiting them as immovable, unchangeable, incapable of ever presenting 

 new phenomena, shows them, on the contrary, to be, in many most impor- 

 tant particulars, not only changeable, but actually undergoing a progressive 

 change. The empirical law, therefore, best expressive, in most cases, of the 

 genuine result of observation, would be, not that such and such a phenom- 

 enon will continue unchanged, but that it will continue to change in some 

 particular manner. 



Accordingly, while almost all generalizations relating to Man and Society, 

 antecedent to the last fifty or sixty years, have erred in the gross way which 

 we have attempted to characterize, namely, by implicitly assuming that na- 

 ture and society will forever revolve in the same orbit, and exhibit essential- 

 ly the same phenomena ; which is also the vulgar error of the ostentatiously 

 practical, the votaries of so-called common sense, in our day, especially in 

 Great Britain ; the more thinking minds of the present age, having applied 

 a more minute analysis to the past records of our race, have for the most 

 part adopted' a contrary opinion, that the human species is in a state of neces- 

 sary progression, and that from the terms of the series which are past we 

 may infer positively those which are yet to come. Of this doctrine, consid- 

 ered as a philosophical tenet, we shall have occasion to speak more fully in 

 the concluding Book, If not, in all its forms, free from error, it is at least 



