376 



INDUCTION. 



which has not either been ascertained 

 by direct observation to follow laws 

 of its own, or been proved to be 

 closely similar to objects and events 

 which, in more familiar manifesta- 

 tions, or on a more limited scale, 

 follow strict laws : our inability to 

 trace the same laws on a larger scale 

 and in the more recondite instances 

 being accounted for by the number 

 and complication of the modifying 

 causes, or by their inaccessibility to 

 observation. 



The progress of experience, there- 

 fore, has dissipated the doubt which 

 must have rested on the universality 

 of the law of causation while there 

 were phenomena which seemed to be 

 sui generis, not subject to the same 

 laws with any other class of pheno- 

 mena, and not as yet ascertained to 

 have peculiar laws of their own. This 

 great generalisation, however, might 

 reasonably have been, as it in fact 

 was, acted on as a probability of the 

 highest order, before there were suffi- 

 cient grounds for receiving it as a 

 certainty. In matters of evidence, 

 as in all other human things, we 

 neither require, nor can attain, the 

 absolute. We must hold even our 

 strongest convictions with an opening 

 left in our minds for the reception of 

 facts which contradict them ; and 

 only when we have taken this pre- 

 caution, have we earned the right' to 

 act upon our convictions with com- 

 plete confidence when no such con- 

 tradiction appears. Whatever has 

 been found true in innumerable in- 

 stances, and never found to be false 

 after due examination in any, we are 

 safe in acting on as universal pro- 

 visionally, until an undoubted excep- 

 tion appears ; provided the nature of 

 the case be such that a real exception 

 could scarcely have escaped notice. 

 When every phenomenon that we ever 

 knew sufficiently well to be able to 

 answer the question had a cause on 

 which it was invariably consequent, 

 it was more rational to suppose that 

 our inability to assign the causes 

 of other phenomena arose from our 



ignorance, than that there were phe- 

 nomena which were uncaused, and 

 which happened to be exactly those 

 which we had hitherto had no suffi- 

 cient opportunity of studying. 



It must, at the same time, be re- 

 marked, that the reasons for this re- 

 liance do not hold in circumstances 

 unknown to us, and beyond the pos- 

 sible range of our experience. In 

 distant parts of the stellar regions, 

 where the phenomena may be entirely 

 unlike those with which we are ac- 

 quainted, it would be folly to affirm 

 confidently that this general law pre- 

 vails, any more than those special 

 ones which we have found to hold 

 universally on our own planet. The 

 uniformity in the succession of events, 

 otherwise called the law of causation, 

 must be received not as a law of the 

 universe, but of that portion of it 

 only which is within the range of our 

 means of sure observation, with a 

 reasonable degree of extension to ad- 

 jacent cases. To extend it further la 

 to make a supposition without evi- 

 dence, and to which, in the absence 

 of any ground from experience for 

 estimating its degree of probability, 

 it would be idle to attempt to assign 

 any.* 



* One of the most rising thinkers of the 

 new generation in France, M. Taine, (who 

 has given, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 

 the most masterly analysis, at least in one 

 point of view, ever made of the present 

 work,) though he rejects, on this and simi- 

 lar points of psychology, the intuition 

 theory in its ordinary form, nevertheless 

 assigns to the law of causation, and to 

 some other of the most universal laws, that 

 certainty beyond the bounds of human ex- 

 perience, which I have not been able to 

 accord to them. He does this on the faith 

 of our faculty of abstraction, in which he 

 seems to recognise an independent source 

 of evidence, not indeed disclosing truths 

 not contained in our experience, but afford- 

 ing an assurance which experience cannot 

 give, of the univers^ality of those which it 

 does contain. By abstraction M. Taino 

 seems to think that we are able, not 

 merely to analyse that part of nature 

 which we see, and exhibit apart the ele- 

 ments which pervade it, but to distinguish 

 such of them as are elements of the system 

 of nature considered as a whole, not inci- 

 dents belonging to our limited terrestrial 

 experience. I am not sure that I fully enter 



