232 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



another, or a mark of a mark of another, nothing is 

 required to render reasoning possible except senses, 

 and association : senses, to perceive that two facts are 

 conjoined; association, as the law by which one of 

 those two facts raises up the idea of the other. For 

 these mental phenomena, as well as for the belief or 

 expectation which follows, and by which we recognise 

 as having taken place, or as about to take place, that 

 of which we have perceived a mark, there is evidently 

 no need of language. And this inference of one par- 

 ticular fact from another is a case of induction. It is 

 of this sort of induction that brutes are capable: it is 

 in this shape that uncultivated minds make almost all 

 their inductions, and that we all do so in the cases in 

 which familiar experience forces our conclusions upon 

 us without any active process of inquiry on our part, 

 and in which the belief or expectation follows the 

 suggestion of the evidence, with the promptitude and 

 certainty of an instinct. 



3. But although inference of an inductive cha- 

 racter is possible without the use of signs, it could 

 never, without them, be carried much beyond the very 

 simple cases which we have just described, and which 

 form, in all probability, the limit of the reasonings of 

 those animals to whom conventional language is un- 

 known. Without language, or something equivalent 

 to it, there could only be as much of reasoning from 

 experience, as can take place without the aid of 

 general propositions. Now, although in strictness we 

 may reason from past experience to a fresh individual 

 case without the intermediate stage of a general pro- 

 position, yet without general propositions we should 

 seldom remember what past experience we have had, 

 and scarcely ever what conclusions that experience 



