386 INDUCTION. 



apart. The rules of experimental inquiry are the 

 contrivances for unravelling the web. 



2. In thus attempting to ascertain the general 

 order of nature by ascertaining the particular order 

 of the occurrence of each one of the phenomena of 

 nature, the most scientific proceeding can be no more 

 than an improved form of that which was primitively 

 pursued by the human understanding, as yet undirected 

 by science. When men first formed the idea of 

 studying phenomena according to a stricter and surer 

 method than that which they had in the first instance 

 spontaneously adopted, they did not, conformably to 

 the well meant but impracticable precept of Descartes, 

 set out from the supposition that nothing had been 

 already ascertained. Many of the uniformities exist- 

 ing among phenomena are so constant, and so open 

 to observation, as to force themselves upon men's 

 involuntary recognition. Some facts are so perpe- 

 tually and familiarly accompanied by certain others, 

 that mankind learnt, as children now learn, to expect 

 the one where they found the other, long before they 

 knew how to put their expectation into words by 

 asserting, in a proposition, the existence of a con- 

 nexion between those phenomena. No science was 

 needed to teach men that food nourishes, that water 

 drowns, or quenches thirst, that the sun gives light 

 and heat, that bodies fall to the ground. The first 

 scientific inquirers assumed these and the like as 

 known truths, and set out from them to discover 

 others which were unknown : nor were they wrong in 

 so doing, subject, however, as they afterwards began 

 to see, to an ulterior revision of these spontaneous 

 generalizations themselves, when the progress of 



