COEXISTENCES rXDEPENDENT OF CAUSATION. 343 



more so, than any of those from which it was drawn. It adds to them 

 as much proof as it receives from them. For there is probably no ono 

 even of the best estabHshed hiws of causation which is not sometimes 

 counteracted, and to which, therefore, apparent exceptions do not 

 present themselves, which would have necessarily and justly shaken 

 the confidence of mankind in the universality of those laws, if inductive 

 processes founded on the universal law had not enabled us to refer those 

 exceptions to the agency of counteracting causes, and thereby reconcile 

 them with the law with which they apparently conflict. Errors, more- 

 over, may have slipped into the statement of any one of the special 

 laws, through inattention to some material circumstance ; and instead 

 of the true proposition, another may have been enunciated, false as an 

 universal law, though leading, in all cases hitlierto observed, to the 

 same result. But the general law of causation would remahi un- 

 affected by any such error. The law of cause and effect is therefore, 

 not without reason, placed, in point of certainty, at the head of all our 

 inductions; on a level with the first principles of mathematics, which 

 rest, as we shall see presently, upon much the same species of induc- 

 tion as itself. 



CHAPTER XXII. 



OP UNIFORMITIES OF COEXISTENCE NOT DEPENDENT UPON CAUSATION. 



§ 1. The order of the occurrence of phenomena in time, is either 

 successive or simultaneous ; the uniformities, therefore, which obtain 

 in their occuiTence, are either uniformities of succession or of coex- 

 istence. Uniformities of succession are alb comprehended under the 

 law of causation and its consequences. Every phenomenon has a 

 cause, which it invariably follows ; and from this are derived other 

 invariable sequences among the successive stages of the -game effect, 

 as well as between the effects resulting frorn causes whick invariably 

 succeed one another. 



In the same manner with these dei-ivative uniformities of succession, 

 a great variety of uniformities of coexistence also take their rise. Co- 

 ordinate effects of the same cause naturally coexist with one another. 

 High water at any point on the earth's surface, and high water at the 

 point diametrically opposite to it, are effects uniformly simultaneous, 

 resulting from the direction in which the combined attraction of the 

 sun and moon act upon the waters of the ocean. An eclipse of the sun 

 to us, and an eclipse of the earth to a spectator situated in the moon, 

 are in like manner phenomena invariably coexistent; and their coex- 

 istence can equally be deduced from the laws of their production. 



It is an obvious question, therefore, whether all the uniformities of 

 coexistence among phenomena may not be accounted for in this man- 

 ner. And it cannot be doubted that between phenomena which are 

 themselves effects, the coexistences must necessarily depend ujjon the 

 causes of those phenomena. If they are effects immediately or remote- 

 ly of the same cause, they cannot coexist except by virtue of some laws 

 or properties of that cause : if they are effects of diffcjent causes, they 



