196 INDUCTION. 



any instance whatever, defeated or suspended by any change of cir- 

 cumstances. 



Now among all those uniformities in the succession of phenomena, 

 which common observation is sufficient to bring to light, there are very 

 few which have any, even apparent, pretension to this rigorous inde- 

 feasibility : and of those few, one only has been found capable of com- 

 pletely sustaining it. In that one, however, we recognize a law which 

 is universal also in another sense ; it is coextensive with the entire 

 field of successive phenomena, all instances whatever of succession 

 being examples of it. This law is the Law of Causation. It is an 

 universal truth that every fact which has a beginning has a cause. 



This generalization may appear to some minds not to amount to 

 much, since after all it asserts only this : " it is a law, that every event 

 depends upon some law." We must not, however, conclude that the 

 generality of the principle is merely verbal : it will be found upon 

 inspection to be no vague or unmeaning assertion, but a most import- 

 ant and really fundamental truth. 



§ 2. The notion of Cause being the root of the whole theory of Induc- 

 tion, it is indispensable that this idea should, at the very outset of our 

 inquiry, be, with the utmost practicable degree of precision, fixed and 

 determined. If, indeed, it were necessary for the purposes of induc- 

 tive logic that the strife should be quelled, which has so long raged 

 among the different schools of metaphysicians, respecting the origin 

 and analysis of our idea of causation ; the promulgation, or at least 

 the general reception, of a true theory of induction, might be con- 

 sidered desperate, for a long time to come. But in this as in most 

 other respects, the science of the Investigation of Truth by means of 

 Evidence, has no need to bon-ow any premisses from the science of 

 the ultimate constitution of the human mind, except such as have at 

 last, though often after long controversy, been incoi-porated into all the 

 existing systems of mental philosophy, or all but such as may be re- 

 garded as essentially effete. 



I premise, then, that when in the course of this inquiry I speak of 

 the cause of any phenomenon, I do not mean a cause which is not 

 itself a phenomenon ; I make no research into the ultimate, or ontolo- 

 gical cause of anything. To adopt a distinction familiar in the wri- 

 tings of the Scotch metaphysicians, and especially of Reid, the causes 

 with which I concern myself are not efficient, but physical causes. 

 They are causes in that sense alone, in which one physical fact may be 

 said to be the cause of another. Of the efficient causes of phenomena, 

 or whether any such causes exist at all, I am not called upon to give 

 an opinion. The notion of causation is deemed, by the schools of 

 metaphysics most in vogue at the present moment, to imply a myste- 

 rious and most powerful tie, such as cannot, or at least does not, exist 

 between any physical fact and that other physical fact upon which it is 

 invariably consequent, and which is popularly termed its cause : and 

 thence is deduced the supposed necessity of ascending higher, into the 

 essences and inherent constitution of things, to find the tiue cause, the 

 cause which is not only followed by, but actually produces, the effect. 

 No such necessity exists for the purposes of the present inquiry, nor 

 will any such doctrine be found in the following pages. But neither 

 \\\\\ there be found anything incompatible with it. We are in no way 



