HO INDUCTION. 



over those associations which the philosophical school 

 of which I have been speaking, regard as connate 

 and instinctive. I am convinced that any one accus- 

 tomed to abstraction and analysis, who will fairly 

 exert his faculties for the purpose, will, when his 

 imagination has once learnt to entertain the notion, 

 mid no difficulty in conceiving that in some one for 

 instance of them any firmaments into which sidereal 

 astronomy now divides the universe, events may 

 succeed one another at random, without any fixed 

 law ; nor can anything in our experience, or in our 

 mental nature, constitute a sufficient, or indeed any, 

 reason for believing that this is nowhere the case. 

 The grounds, therefore, which warrant us in rejecting 

 such a supposition with respect to any of the phe- 

 nomena of which we have experience, must be sought 

 elsewhere than in any supposed necessity of our intel- 

 lectual faculties. 



As was observed in a former place *, the belief we 

 entertain in the universality, throughout nature, of the 

 law of cause and effect, is itself an instance of induc- 

 tion; and by no means one of the earliest which any 

 of us, or which mankind in general, can have made. 

 We arrive at this universal law, by generalization from 

 many laws of inferior generality. The generalizing 

 propensity, which, instinctive or not, is one of the 

 most powerful principles of our nature, does not 

 indeed wait for the period when such a generalization 

 becomes strictly legitimate. The mere unreasoning 

 propensity to expect what has been often experienced, 

 doubtless led men to believe that everything had a 

 cause, before they could have conclusive evidence of 

 that truth. But even this cannot be supposed to have 



* Supra, vol. i., p. 3;2. 



