LAWS OF NATURE. 385 



impulse originally impressed upon them. After this 

 great discovery, Kepler's three propositions, though 

 still called laws, would hardly, by any person accus- 

 tomed to use language with precision, be termed Jaws 

 of nature : that phrase would be reserved for the 

 simpler laws into which Newton, as the expression 

 is, resolved them. 



According to this language, every well-grounded 

 inductive generalization is either a law of nature, or a 

 result of laws of nature, capable, if those laws are 

 known, of being predicted from them. And the 

 problem of Inductive Logic may be summed up in 

 two questions : How to ascertain the laws of nature? 

 and How, after having ascertained them, to follow 

 them into their results ? On the other hand, we must 

 not suffer ourselves to imagine that this .mode of 

 statement amounts to a real analysis, or to anything 

 but a mere verbal transformation of the problem; 

 for the expression, Laws of Nature, means nothing 

 but the uniformities which exist among natural phe- 

 nomena (or, in other words, the results of induction,) 

 when reduced to their simplest expression. It is, 

 however, something, to have advanced so far, as to 

 see that the study of nature is the study of laws, not 

 a law ; of uniformities, in the plural number : that 

 the different natural phenomena have their separate 

 rules or modes of taking place, which, though much 

 intermixed and entangled with one another, may, to a 

 certain extent, be studied apart : that (to resume our 

 former metaphor) the regularity which exists in 

 nature is a web composed of distinct threads, and only 

 to be understood by tracing each of the threads sepa- 

 rately; for which purpose it is often necessary to 

 unravel some portion of the web, and exhibit the fibres 

 VOL i. 2 c 



