360 INDUCTION. 



certainty and scientific accuracy to the conclusions of what are called 

 the exact sciences, and less to he relied upon in practice. There are 

 reasons enough why the moral sciences must remain inferior to at least 

 the more perfect of the physical ; why the laws of their more compli- 

 cated phenomena cannot be so completely deciphei'ed, nor the phe- 

 nomena predicted with the same degiee of assurance. But though we 

 cannot attain to so many truths, there is no reason that those we can 

 attain should deserve less reliance, or have less of a scientific character. 

 Of this topic, however, we shaU treat more systematically in the con- 

 cluding Book, to which place any further consideration of it must be 

 deferred. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



OF THE REMALVING LAWS OF NATURE. 



§ 1. In the First Book we found that all the assertions which can be 

 conveyed by language, express some one or more of five different 

 things: Existence; Order in Place; Oi-der in Time; Causation; and 

 Resemblance.* Of these. Causation, in our view of the subject, not 

 being fundamentally different from Order in Time, the five sjiecies of 

 possible assertions are reduced to four. The propositions which affirm 

 Order in Time, in either of its two modes. Coexistence and Succession, 

 have foiined, thus far, the subject of the present Book. And we have 

 now concluded the exposition, so far as it falls within the limits 

 assigned to this work, of the nature of the evidence on which these 

 propositions rest, and the processes of investigation by which they are 

 discovered and proved. There remain three classes of facts : Exist- 

 ence, Oi-der in Place, and Resemblance ; in regard to which the same 

 questions are now to be resolved. 



Regarding the first of these, very little needs be said. Existence in 

 general, is a subject not for our science, but for the higher metaphysics. 

 To determine what things can be recognized as really existing, inde- 

 pendently of our own sensible or other impressions, and in what mean- 

 ing the tei-m is, in that case, predicated of them, belongs to the con- 

 sideration of " Things in themselves," from which, throughout this 

 work, we have as much as possible kept aloof Existence, so far as 

 Logic is concerned about it, has reference only to phenomena ; to actual, 

 or possible, states of external or internal consciousness, in ourselves or 

 others. Feelings of sensitive beings, or possibilities of having such 

 feelings, are the only things the existence of which can be a subject of 

 logical induction, because the only things of which the existence in 

 individual cases can be a subject of experience. 



It is true that a thing is said by us to exist, even when it is absent, 

 and therefore is not and cannot be perceived. But even then, its exist- 

 ence ia to us only another word for our conviction that we should per- 

 ceive it on a certain supposition; if we were placed in the needful 



* Supra, 70. 



