TRAINS OF REASONING. 279 



to desire the good of the people, we thereupon, by a 

 second induction, infer that the Prussian government 

 desires the good of the people. This brings that 

 government into known resemblance with the other 

 governments which were observed to escape revo- 

 lution, and thence, by a third induction, we predict 

 that the Prussian government will in like manner 

 escape. And thus we are enabled to reason from the 

 well-intentioned governments which we historically 

 know as having escaped revolution, to other govern- 

 ments which, when we made the induction, we may 

 have known nothing about : yet if the induction was 

 good, and therefore applicable to all governments of 

 which we know the intentions but do not know the 

 fortunes, it must be no less applicable to those whose 

 intentions we do not know, but can only infer, pro- 

 vided this inference also rests upon a good induction. 

 We are still reasoning from particulars to particulars, 

 but we now reason to the new instance from three 

 distinct sets of former instances : to one only of those 

 sets of instances do we directly perceive the new one 

 to be similar; but from that similarity we inductively 

 infer that it has the attribute by which it is assimilated 

 to the next set, and brought within the corresponding 

 induction ; when by a repetition of the same operation 

 we infer it to be similar to the third set, and hence a 

 third induction conducts us to the ultimate conclusion. 



$ 3. Notwithstanding the superior complication 

 of these examples, compared with those by which in 

 the preceding chapter we illustrated the general theory 

 of reasoning, every doctrine which we then laid down 

 holds equally true in these more intricate cases. The 

 successive general propositions are not steps in the 

 reasoning, are not intermediate links in the chain of 



