NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 637 



tion of its truth is far more like a religious faitli than like 

 assent to a demonstration. The only cohesions which ex- 

 perience in the literal sense of the word produces in our 

 mind are, as we contended some time back, the proximate 

 laws of nature, and habitudes of concrete things, that heat 

 melts ice, that salt preserves meat, that fish die out of 

 w^ater, and the like."^ Such ' empirical truths ' as these we 



* " It is perfectly true that our world of experience begins witli such 

 associations as lead us to expect that what has happened to us will happen 

 again. These associations lead the babe to look for milk from its nurse 

 and not from its father, the child to believe that the apple he sees will 

 taste good; and whilst they make him wish for it, thej^ make him fear the 

 bottle which contains his bitter medicine. But whereas a part of these 

 associations grows confirmed by frequent repetition, another part is de- 

 stroj'ed by contradictory experiences; and the world becomes divided for 

 us into two provinces, one in which we are at home and anticipate with 

 confidence always the same sequences; another tilled with alternating, 

 variable, accidental occurrences. 



"... Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-daj' matter that we 

 need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is 

 the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of 

 chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further reflection might 

 find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; 

 it is a subject of a.stonishment, a davjaa, and the credulity with which in 

 this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched 

 by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with 

 them. 



" The wliole historj^ of popular beliefs about nature refutes the notion 

 that the thought of an universal phj'sical order can possiblj' have arisen 

 through the purely passive reception and association of particular percep- 

 tions. Indubitable as it is that all men infer from known cases to unknown, 

 it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to the phenomenal 

 materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would never have led to 

 the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the belief that law and law- 

 lessness rule the world in motley alternation. From the point of view of 

 strict empiricism nothing exists but the sum of particular perceptions with 

 their coincidences on the one hand, their contradictions on the other. 



" That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is not 

 discovered till the order is looked for. The first impulse to look for it pro- 

 ceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, we must know 

 Trustworthy means which infalliblj' ]>ossess a property or produce a result. 

 But tlie practical need is only the first occasion for our reflection on the 

 conditions of a true knowledge; even were there no such need, motives 

 would still be present to carry us beyond the stage of mere association. 

 For not with an equal interest, or rather with an equal lack of interest, 

 does man contemplate those natural processes in which like is joined to 

 like, and those in which like and unlike are joined; the former processes 



