260 THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 



derivatives the Italian cosa, and the French chose, mean 

 / simply thing. In the German equivalent ursache, we have 

 plainly the original meaning of thing before, the sacke 

 denoting ' interesting or important object/ the English 

 sake, and ur being the equivalent of the English ere, 

 before* 1 . We abandon, then, both etymology and philo- 

 sophy, when we attribute to the laws of causation any 

 meaning beyond that of the conditions in which an event 

 may be expected to happen, according to our observation 

 of the previous course of nature. 



I have no objection to use the words cause and 

 causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to 

 imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to cer- 

 tainty. I repeat that if a cause is an invariable and 

 necessary condition of an event, we can never know 

 certainly whether the cause exists or not. To us, then, a 

 cause is not to be distinguished from the group of positive 

 or negative conditions which, with more or less probability, 

 precede an event. In this sense, there is no particular 

 difference between knowledge of causes and our general 

 knowledge of the combinations, or succession of com- 

 binations, in which the phenomena of nature are presented 

 to us, or found to occur in experimental inquiry. 



Distinction of Inductive and Deductive Results. 



We must carefully avoid confusing together inductive 

 investigations which terminate in the establishment of 

 general laws, and those which seem to lead directly to 

 the knowledge of future particular events. That process 

 only can be called induction which gives general laws, 

 and it is by the subsequent employment of deduction that 

 we can alone anticipate particular events. If the ob- 

 servation of a number of cases shews that alloys of metals 



h Leslie, ' Inquiry into the Nature of Heat/ Note xvi. p. 521. 



