226 



INDUCTION. 



There exist in nature a number of 

 permanent causes, which have sub- 

 sisted ever since the human race has 

 been in existence, and for an indefi- 

 nite and probably an enormous length 

 of time previous. The sun, the earth, 

 and planets, with their various con- 

 stituents, air, water, and other distin- 

 guishable substances, whether simple 

 or compound, of which nature is made 

 up, are such Permanent Causes. These 

 have existed, and the effects or con- 

 sequences which they were fitted to 

 produce have taken place (as often as 

 the other conditions of the production 

 met) from the very beginning of our 

 experience. But we can give no ac- 

 count of the origin of the Permanent 

 Causes themselves. Why these par- 

 ticular natural agents existed origi- 

 nally and no others, or why they are 

 commingled in such and such propor- 

 tions, and distributed in such and 

 such a manner throughout space, is a 

 question we cannot answer. More 

 than this : we can discover nothing 

 regular in the distribution itself ; we 

 can reduce it to no uniformity, to no 

 law. There are no means by which, 

 from the distribution of these causes 

 or agents in one part of space we 

 could conjecture whether a similar 

 distribution prevails in another. The 

 co-existence, therefore, of Primeval 

 Causes ranks, to us, among merely 

 casual concurrences ; and all those 

 sequences or co-existences among the 

 effects of several such causes, which, 

 though invariable while those causes 

 co-exist, would, if the co-existence ter- 

 minated, terminate along with it, we 

 do not class as cases of causation, or 

 Jaws of nature : we can only calculate 

 on finding these sequences or co- 

 existences where we know by direct 

 evidence that the natural agents on 

 the properties of which they ulti- 

 mately depend are distributed in the 

 requisite manner. These Permanent 

 Causes are not always objects ; they 

 are sometimes events, that is to say, 

 periodical cycles of events, that being 

 the only mode in which events can 

 possess the property of permanence, 



Not only, for instance, is the earth 

 itself a permanent cause, or primitive 

 natvu-al agent, but the earth's rota- 

 tion is so too : it is a cause which has 

 produced, from the earliest period, 

 (by the aid of other necessary condi- 

 tions,) the succession of day and night, 

 the ebb and flow of the sea, and many 

 other effects, while, as we can assign 

 no cause (except conjecturally) for the 

 rotation itself, it is entitled to be 

 ranked as a primeval cause. It is, 

 however, only the origin of the rota- 

 tion which is mysterious to us : once 

 begun, its continuance is accounted 

 for by the first law of motion (that 

 of the permanence of rectilinear mo- 

 tion once impressed) combined with 

 the gravitation of the parts of the 

 earth towards one another. 



All phenomena without exception 

 which begin to exist, that is, all ex- 

 cept the primeval causes, are effects 

 either immediate or remote of those 

 primitive facts, or of some combina- 

 tion of them. There is no Thing 

 produced, no event happening, in the 

 known universe, which is not con- 

 nected by an uniformity, or invari- 

 able sequence, with some one or more 

 of the phenomena which preceded it ; 

 insomuch that it will happen again 

 as often as those phenomena occur 

 again, and as no other phenomenon 

 having the character of a counteract- 

 ing cause shall co-exist. These ante- 

 cedent phenomena, again, were con- 

 nected in a similar manner with some 

 that preceded them ; and so on, until 

 we reach, as the ultimate step attain- 

 able by us, either the properties of 

 some one primeval cause, or, the con- 

 junction of several. The whole of 

 the phenomena of nature were there- 

 fore the necessary, or, in other wwds, 

 the unconditional, consequences of 

 some former collocation <rf the Per- 

 manent Causes. 



The state of the whole universe at 

 any instant we believe to be the con- 

 sequence of its state at the previous 

 instant ; insomuch that one who knew 

 all the agents which exist at the 

 present moment, their opllocation in 



