440 INDUCTION. 



in nature ; and we have done enough when we have 

 carried the sub-division as far as the point at which 

 we are able to see what observations or experiments 

 we require. It is only essential, at whatever point our 

 mental decomposition of facts may for the present 

 have stopped, that we should hold ourselves ready 

 and able to carry it farther as occasion requires, and 

 should not allow the freedom of our discriminating 

 faculty to be imprisoned by the swathes and bands of 

 ordinary classification ; as was the case with all early 

 speculative inquirers, not excepting the Greeks, to 

 whom it hardly ever occurred that what was called 

 by one abstract name might, in reality, be several 

 phenomena, or that there was a possibility of decom- 

 posing the facts of the universe into any elements 

 but those which ordinary language already recog- 

 nised, 



$ 2. The different antecedents and consequents 

 being, then, supposed to be, so far as the case 

 requires, ascertained and discriminated from one 

 another ; we are to inquire which is connected with 

 which. In every instance which comes under our 

 observation, there are many antecedents and many 

 consequents. If those antecedents could not be 

 severed from one another except in thought, or if 

 those consequents never were found apart, it would 

 be impossible for us to distinguish (a posteriori at 

 least) the real laws, or to assign to any cause its 

 effect, or to any effect its cause. To do so, we must 

 be able to meet with some of the antecedents apart 

 from the rest, and observe what follows from them ; 

 or some of the consequents, and observe by what they 

 are preceded. We must, in short, follow the Baco- 

 nian rule of varying the circumstances. This is, indeed, 



