INDUCTIONS IMPROPERLY SO CALLED. 361 



itself is not in the facts, but in our mind, it must be a 

 conception of something which really is in the facts, 

 some property which they actually possess, and which 

 they would manifest to our senses, if our senses were 

 able to take cognizance of them. If, for instance, 

 the planet left behind it in space a visible track, and 

 if the observer were in a fixed position at such a 

 distance above the plane of the orbit as would enable 

 him to see the whole of it at once, he would see it to 

 be an ellipse ; and if gifted with appropriate instru- 

 ments, and powers of locomotion, he could prove it to 

 be such by measuring its different dimensions. These 

 things are indeed impossible to us, but not impossible 

 in themselves ; if they were so, Kepler's law could 

 not be true. 



Subject to the indispensable condition which has 

 just been stated, I cannot perceive that the part which 

 conceptions have in the operation of studying facts, 

 has ever been overlooked or undervalued as Mr. 

 Whewell supposes it has. No one ever disputed 

 that in order to reason about anything we must have 

 a conception of it ; or that when we include a multi- 

 tude of things under a general expression, there is 

 implied in the expression a conception of something 

 common to those things. But it by no means follows 

 that the conception is necessarily pre-existent, or 

 constructed by the mind out of its own materials. 

 If the facts are rightly classed under the conception, it 

 is because there is in the facts themselves something 

 of which the conception is itself a copy ; and which 

 if we cannot directly perceive, it is because of the 

 limited power of our organs, and not because the 

 thing itself is not there. The conception itself is 

 often obtained by abstraction from the very facts 

 which, in Mr. Whewell's language, it is afterwards 



