OBSERVATION AND EXPERIMENT. 449 



process by which nature produces them ; and this 

 being to us a mysterious process, of which the main 

 circumstances are not only unknown but unobservable, 

 the name of experimentation would here be com- 

 pletely misapplied. Such are the facts : and what is 

 the result ? That on this vast subject, which affords 

 so much and such varied scope for observation, we 

 have not, properly speaking, ascertained a single 

 cause, a single unconditional uniformity. We know 

 not, in the case of almost any of the phenomena that 

 we find conjoined, which is the condition of the other ; 

 which is cause, and which effect, or whether either of 

 them is so, or they are not rather all of them conjunct 

 effects of causes yet to be discovered, complex results 

 of laws hitherto unknown. 



Although some of the foregoing observations may 

 be, in technical strictness of arrangement, premature 

 in this place, it seemed that a few general remarks 

 upon the difference between Sciences of mere Obser- 

 vation and Sciences of Experimentation, and the 

 extreme disadvantage under which directly inductive 

 inquiry is necessarily carried on in the former, were 

 the best preparation for discussing the methods of 

 direct induction ; a preparation rendering superfluous 

 much that must otherwise have been introduced, with 

 some inconvenience, into the heart of that discussion. 

 To the consideration of these Methods we now 

 proceed. 



VOL. i. 2 G 



