354 INDUCTION. 



dom the means of knowing whether any individual person has been 

 under the influence of those causes, or is a person of that particular 

 sort. We could replace the approximate generalizations by proposi- 

 tions universally true; but these would hardly ever be capable of 

 beino- applied to practice. We should be sure of om- majors, but we 

 shoutd not be able to get minors corresponding to them : we are 

 forced therefore, to draw our conclusions from coarser and more fallible 

 indications. 



§ 4. Proceeding now to consider, what is to be regarded as suf- 

 ficient evidence of an approximate generalization ; we can have no 

 difficulty in at once recognizing that when admissible at all, it is ad- 

 missible only as an empirical law. Propositions of the form. Every 

 A is B, are not necessarily laws of causation, or ultimate uniformities 

 of coexistence ; propositions like Most A are B, cannot be so. Propo- 

 sitions hitherto found true in every observed instance, may yet be no 

 necessary consequence of laws of causation or of ultimate uniformities, 

 and unless they are so, may, for aught we know, be false beyond the 

 limits of actual obsei^-ation : still more evidently must this be the case 

 with propositions which are only true in a mere majority of the ob- 

 served instances. 



There is some difference, however, in the degi'ee of certainty of the 

 proposition. Most A are B, according as that approximate generaliza- 

 tion composes the whole of our knowledge of the subject, or not. 

 Suppose, first, that the former is the case. We know only that most 

 A are B, not why they are so, nor in what respect those which are, 

 differ from those which are not. How then did we learn that most A 

 are B 1 Precisely in the manner in which we should have learnt, had 

 such happened to' be the fact, that all A are B. We collected a num- 

 ber of instances sufficient to eliminate chance, and having done so, 

 compared the number of instances in the aflBrmative with the number in 

 the negative. The result, like other unresolved derivative laws, can be 

 rebed on solely within the limits not only of place and time, but also of 

 circumstance, under which its truth has been actually observed ; for 

 as we are supposed to be ignorant of the causes which make the 

 proposition true, we cannot tell in what manner any new circumstance 

 might perhaps affect it. The proposition. Most judges are inaccessi- 

 ble to bribes, would be found true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Ger- 

 mans, North Americans, and so forth ; but if on this evidence alone we 

 extended the assertion to Orientals, we should step beyond the limits, 

 not only of place but of circumstance, within which the fact had been 

 observed, and should let in possibilities of the absence of the deter- 

 mining causes, or the presence of counteracting ones, which might be 

 fatal to the approximate generalization. 



In the case where the approximate proposition is not the ultimatum 

 of our scientific knowledge, but only the most available form of it for 

 our practical guidance ; where we know not only that most A have the 

 attribute B, but also the causes of B, or some properties by which the 

 portion of A which has that attribute is distinguished from the portion 

 which has it not ; we are rather more favorably situated than in the 

 preceding case. For we have now a double mode of ascertaining 

 whether it be true that most A are B ; the direct mode, as before, 

 and an indirect one, that of examining whether the proposition admits 



