370 



INDUCTION. 



sistently do, since the human facul- 

 ties are all which any one has to 

 judge by ; and inasmuch as the mean- 

 ing of the word evidence is supposed 

 to be something which, when laid 

 before the mind, induces it to believe ; 

 to demand evidence when the belief 

 is ensured by the mind's own laws is 

 supposed to be appealing to the in- 

 tellect against the intellect. But this, 

 I apprehend, is a misunderstanding 

 of the nature of evidence. By evi- 

 dence is not meant anything and 

 everything which produces belief. 

 There are many things which gene- 

 rate belief besides evidence. A mere 

 strong association of ideas often causes 

 a belief so intense as to be unshake- 

 able by experience or argument. Evi- 

 dence is not that which the mind 

 does or must yield to, but that which 

 it ought to yield to, namely, that, by 

 yielding to which, its belief is kept 

 conformable to fact. There is no ap- 

 peal from the human faculties gene- 

 rally, but there is an appeal from one 

 human faculty to another ; from the 

 judging faculty to those which take 

 cognisance of fact, the faculties of 

 sense and consciousness. The legiti- 

 macy of this appeal is admitted when- 

 ever it is allowed that our judgments 

 ought to be conformable to fact. To 

 say that belief suffices for its own 

 justification is making opinion the 

 test of opinion ; it is denying the ex- 

 istence of any outward standard, the 

 conformity of an opinion to which 

 constitutes its truth. We call one 

 mode of forming opinions right and 

 another wrong, because the one does 

 and the other does not tend to make 

 the opinion agree with the fact — to 

 make people believe what really is, 

 and expect what really will be. Now 

 a mere disposition to believe, even if 

 supposed instinctive, is no guarantee 

 for the truth of the thing believed. 

 If, indeed, the belief ever amounted 

 to an irresistible necessity, there would 

 then be no use in appealing from it, 

 because there would be no possibility 

 of altering it. But even then the 

 truth of the belief would not foUow ; 



it would only follow that mankind 

 were under a permanent necessity of 

 believing what might possibly not 

 be true ; in other words, that a case 

 might occur in which our senses or 

 consciousness, if they could be ap- 

 pealed to, might testify one thing and 

 our reason believe another. But in 

 fact there is no such permanent neces- 

 sity. There is no proposition of which 

 it can be asserted that every human 

 mind must eternally and irrevocably 

 believe it. Many of the propositions 

 of which this is most confidently 

 stated great numbers of human beings 

 have disbelieved. The things which 

 it has been supposed that nobody 

 could possibly help believing are in- 

 numerable ; but no two generations 

 would make out the same catalogue 

 of them. One age or nation believes 

 implicitly what to another seems in- 

 credible and inconceivable ; one indi- 

 vidual has not a vestige of a belief 

 which another deems to be absolutely 

 inherent in humanity. There is not 

 one of these supposed instinctive be- 

 liefs which is really inevitable. It is 

 in the power of every one to cultivate 

 habits of thought which make him 

 independent of them. The habit of 

 philosophical analysis, (of which it is 

 the surest effect to enable the mind 

 to command, instead of being com- 

 manded by, the laws of the merely 

 passive part of its own nature,) by 

 showing to us that things are not 

 necessarily connected in fact because 

 their ideas are connected in our minds, 

 is able to loosen innumerable associa- 

 tions which reign despotically over 

 the undisciplined or early-prejudiced 

 mind. And this habit is not without 

 power even over those associations 

 which the school of which I have 

 been speaking regard as connate and 

 instinctive. I am convinced that any 

 one accustomed to abstraction and 

 analysis, who will fairly exert his 

 faculties for the purpose, will, when 

 his imagination has once learnt to 

 entertain the notion, find no difficulty 

 in conceiving that in some one, for 

 instance, of the many firmaments 



