190 DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY 



CHAP. VII. 



OF THE HIGHER DEGREES OF INDUCTIVE GENERALIZA- 

 TION, AND OF THE FORMATION AND VERIFICATION 

 OF THEORIES. 



(201.) A.S particular inductions and laws of the first 

 degree of generality are obtained from the consider- 

 ation of individual facts, so Theories result from a 

 consideration of these laws, and of the proximate 

 causes brought into view in the previous process, 

 regarded all together as constituting a new set of 

 phenomena, the creatures of reason rather than of 

 sense, and each representing under general lan- 

 guage innumerable particular facts. In raising these 

 higher inductions, therefore, more scope is given to 

 the exercise of pure reason than in slowly groping 

 out our first results. The mind is more disencum- 

 bered of matter, and moves as it were in its own 

 element. What is now before it, it perceives more 

 intimately, and less through the medium of sense, 

 or at least not in the same manner as when actually 

 at work on the immediate objects of sense. But it 

 must not be therefore supposed that, in the formation 

 of theories, we are abandoned to the unrestrained 

 exercise of imagination, or at liberty to lay down 

 arbitrary principles, or assume the existence of mere 

 fanciful causes. The liberty of speculation which 

 we possess in the domains of theory is not like 

 the wild licence of the slave broke loose from his 



