118 INDUCTION. 



those with which we are acquainted, it would be folly 

 to affirm confidently that this general law prevails, 

 any more than those special ones which we have 

 found to hold universally on our own planet. The 

 uniformity in the succession of events, otherwise 

 called the law of causation, must be received not as a 

 law of the universe, but of that portion of it only which 

 is within the range of our means of sure observation, 

 with a reasonable degree of extension to adjacent 

 cases. To extend it further is to make a supposition 

 without evidence, and to which, in the absence of any 

 ground from experience for estimating its degree of 

 probability, it would be ridiculous to affeet to assign 

 any. 



But, on the other hand, within the bounds of 

 human experience,, this fundamental law, though itself 

 obtained by induction from particular laws of causa- 

 tion, cannot be deemed less certain, but on the 

 contrary more so, than any of those from which it 

 was drawn. It adds to them as much proof as it 

 receives from them. For there is probably no one 

 even of the best established laws of causation which is 

 not sometimes counteracted, and to which, therefore, 

 apparent exceptions do not present themselves, which 

 would have necessarily and justly shaken the confi- 

 dence of mankind in the universality of those laws, if 

 inductive processes founded on the universal law had 

 not enabled us to refer those exceptions to the agency 

 of counteracting causes, and thereby reconcile them 

 with the law with which they apparently conflict. 

 Errors, moreover, may have slipped into the state- 

 ment of any one of the special laws, through inatten- 

 tion to some material circumstance ; and instead of the 

 true proposition, another may have been enunciated, 

 false as an universal law, though leading, in all cases 



