27 
own premise! ‘That. he is not misrepresented will appear 
from the following citations from his Logic, Book III., chap. 
21 :—“ As was observed in a former place, the belief we enter- 
tain in the universality throughout nature of the law of cause 
and effect, is itself an instance of induction, and by no means 
one of the earliest which any of us, or which mankind in 
general can have made. We arrive at this universal law by 
generalisation from many laws of inferior generality,” p. 100. 
“Ts there not, then, an inconsistency in contrasting the loose- 
ness of one method with the rigidity of another, when that 
other is indebted to the looser method for its own foundation ? ”’ 
p. 101. ‘Can we prove a proposition by an argument which 
it takes for granted?” p.96. This question, Mr. Mill then 
says, he has ‘‘ purposely stated in the strongest terms it will 
admit of,” in order to reject the doctrine of a belief in causa- 
tion as a necessary, intuitive law, and to assert his (as we 
think, erroneous) doctrine, which attempts to make the induc- 
tive process prove its own fundamental premise. His apology 
for this violation of the very first principle of logic and 
common sense is, that the belief in causation, while only an 
empirical induction, is “an empirical law coextensive with all 
human experience; at which point the distinction between 
empirical laws and laws of nature vanishes, and the proposi- 
tion takes its place among the most firmly established as well 
as the largest truths accessible to science,” p. 103. 
One question dissipates this attempted solution. Isa pro- 
cess of inductive demonstration only valid, then, to one whose 
empirical knowledge ‘‘is coextensive with all human experi- 
ence”? No. Mr. Mill, for instance, when explaining the 
proof of a natural law by the ‘‘ method of difference,” made 
these two correct statements: that this method is rigidly con- 
clusive when its conditions are observed; and that it is by 
this method the common people really infer the commonly 
known laws. It appears, then, by his own statement, that a 
beginner in inductive reasoning, long before he has widened 
his knowledge until it is ‘‘ coextensive with all human experi- 
ence,’ may make, and does make, inductions to general laws 
that are valid. Whence does he procure his universal major 
premise? Again: the empirical knowledge of the most 
learned observer in the world bears but a minute, almost an 
infinitesimal, ratio to the multitude of consecutions of events 
which take place outside of his knowledge. The idea that 
mere empirical observation can ever establish a law as 
universal is therefore delusive. It proceeds upon the supposi- 
tion that, as the number of agreeing observed instances 1s 
widened, the probability grows towards a certainty that their 
