GROUND OF INDUCTION. 371 



This universal fact, which is our warrant for all 

 inference from experience, has been described by dif- 

 ferent philosophers in different forms of language: 

 that the course of nature is uniform ; that the universe 

 is governed by general laws ; and the like. One of 

 the most usual of these modes of expression, but also 

 one of the most inadequate, is that which has been 

 brought into familiar use by the metaphysicians of the 

 school of Reid and Stewart. The disposition of the 

 human mind to generalize from experience, a pro- 

 pensity considered by these philosophers as an instinct 

 of our nature, they usually describe under the name 

 of " our intuitive conviction that the future will re- 

 semble the past." Now it has been well pointed 

 out by Mr. Bailey*, that (whether the tendency be 

 or not an original and ultimate element of our 

 nature), Time, in its modifications of past, present, 

 and future, has no concern either with the belief itself, 

 or with the grounds of it. We believe that fire will 

 burn to-morrow, because it burned to-day and yester- 

 day ; but we believe, on precisely the same grounds, 

 that it burned before we were born, and that it burns 

 this very day in Cochin-China. It is not from the 

 past to the future, as past and future, that we infer, 

 but from the known to the unknown; from facts 

 observed to facts unobserved ; from what we have 

 perceived, or been directly conscious of, to what 

 has not come within our experience. In this last 

 predicament is the whole region of the future ; but 

 also the vastly greater portion of the present and of 

 the past. 



Whatever be the most proper mode of expressing 



* Essays on the Pursuit of Truth. 



2 B 2 



