HYPOTHESES. 287 



resolution of a ilerivativc law into more general laws, brings us nearer 

 to them. 



Since we are continually discovering that unifoi'mities, not previously 

 known to he other than ultimate, are derivative, and resolvable into 

 more general laws; since (in other words) we are continually discover- 

 ing an explanation of some sequence, which was previously known only 

 as a fact ; it becomes an interesting (piestion whether there are any ne- 

 cessary limits to this philosophical operation, or whether it may proceed 

 until all the uniform sequences in nature are resolved into some one 

 universal law. For this seems, at first sight, to be the ultimatum 

 towards which the progress of induction, by the Deductive Method 

 resting on a basis of observation and experiment, is progressively 

 tending. Projects of this kind were universal in the infancy of j)liilo- 

 sophy ; any speculations which held out a less brilliant prospect, being 

 in those early- times deemed not worth pursuing. And the .idea 

 receives so much apparent countenance from the nature of the most 

 remarkable achievements of modern science, that speculators are e^ven 

 now constantly rising up (more often on the continent of Europe than 

 in this island) who profess either to have solved the problem, or to 

 suggest modes in which it may one day be solved. Even where pre- 

 tensions of this magnitude are not made, the character of the sohrtions 

 .which are given, or sought, of particiilar classes of phenomena, often 

 involves such conceptions of what constitutes explanation, as would 

 render the notion of explaining all phenomena whatever by means of 

 some one cause, or law^ perfectly admissible. 



§ 2. It is, therefore, useful to remark, that the ultimate Laws of Na- 

 ture caimot possibly be less numerous than the distinguishable sensations 

 or other feelings of our nature ; — those, I mean, which are distinguishable 

 from one another in quality, and not merely in quantity or degree. For 

 example ; since there is a phenomenon sui generis, called color, Avhich 

 our consciousness testifies to be not a particular degree of some other 

 phenomenon, as heat, or odor, or motion, but intrinsically unlike all 

 others, it follows that there are ultimate laws of color ; that, ajthough 

 the facts of color may admit of expUmation, they never can be ex- 

 plained from laws of heat or odor alone, or of motion alone, but that 

 however far the .explanation may be can-ied, there will always remain 

 in it a law of color. I do not mean that it might not possibly be shown 

 that some other phenomenon, some chemical or mechanical action, for 

 example, invariably precedes, and is the cause of, every. phenomenon 

 of color. But although this, if proved, would be an important exten- 

 sion of our knowledge of nature, it would not explain how or why a 

 motion, or a chemic^al action, should produce a sensation of color ; and 

 however diligent might bo our scrutiny of the phenomena, whatever 

 number of hidden -links we might detect in the chain of causation 

 terminating in the color, the la.st link would still be a law of color, not 

 a law of motion, nor of any other plienomenon whatever. Nor does thid 

 observation apply only to color, as compared with any other of the great 

 classes of sensations ; it applies to every particular color, as cohnpared 

 with others. White color can in no manner be explained exclusively 

 by the laws of the production of red color. In any attempt to explain it, 

 we cannot but introduce, as one element of the explanation, the prop- 

 osition that some antecedent or other produces the sensation of white. 



