396 INDUCTION. 



This generalization may appear to some minds 

 not to amount to much, since after all it asserts only 

 this : " it is a law, that every event depends upon 

 some law." We must not, however, conclude that 

 the generality of the principle is merely verbal ; it 

 will be found upon inspection to be no vague or 

 unmeaning assertion, but a most important and really 

 fundamental truth. 



2. The notion of Cause being the root of the 

 whole theory of Induction, it is indispensable that this 

 idea should, at the very outset of our inquiry, be, with 

 the utmost practicable degree of precision, fixed and 

 determined. If, indeed, it were necessary for the 

 purposes of inductive logic that the strife should be 

 quelled, which has so long raged among the different 

 schools of metaphysicians, respecting the origin and 

 analysis of our idea of causation ; the promulgation, 

 or at least the general reception, of a true theory of 

 induction, might be considered desperate, for a long 

 time to come. But in this as in most other respects, 

 the science of the Investigation of Truth by means 

 of Evidence, has no need to borrow any premisses 

 from the science of the ultimate constitution of the 

 human mind, except such as have at last, though 

 often after long controversy, been incorporated into 

 all the existing systems of mental philosophy, or all 

 but such as may be regarded as essentially effete. 



I premise, then, that when in the course of this 

 inquiry I speak of the cause of any phenomenon, I 

 do not mean a cause which is not itself a pheno- 

 menon ; I make no research into the ultimate, or 

 ontological cause of anything. To adopt a distinction 

 familiar in the writings of the Scotch metaphysicians 

 and especially of Reid, the causes with which I 



