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Title: A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive
7th Edition, Vol. II
Author: John Stuart Mill
Release Date: February 27, 2011 [EBook #35421]
Language: English
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A
SYSTEM OF LOGIC
RATIOCINATIVE AND INDUCTIVE
VOL. II.
A
SYSTEM OF LOGIC
RATIOCINATIVE AND INDUCTIVE
BEING A CONNECTED VIEW OF THE
PRINCIPLES OF EVIDENCE
AND THE
METHODS OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION
BY
JOHN STUART MILL
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.
SEVENTH EDITION
LONDON:
LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER
MDCCCLXVIII
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
BOOK III.
ON INDUCTION.—(Continued.)
Chapter XIV. Of the Limits to the Explanation of Laws of Nature; and of Hypotheses.
§
1.Can all the sequences in nature be resolvable into one law?
3 2.Ultimate laws cannot be less numerous than the distinguishable feelings of our nature
4 3.In what sense ultimate facts can be explained
7 4.The proper use of scientific hypotheses
8 5.Their indispensableness
16 6.Legitimate, how distinguished from illegitimate hypotheses
18 7.Some inquiries apparently hypothetical are really inductive
25Chapter XV. Of Progressive Effects; and of the Continued Action of Causes.
§
1.How a progressive effect results from the simple continuance of the cause
29 2.—and from the progressiveness of the cause
33 3.Derivative laws generated from a single ultimate law
36Chapter XVI. Of Empirical Laws.
§
1.Definition of an empirical law
38 2.Derivative laws commonly depend on collocations
39 3.The collocations of the permanent causes are not reducible to any law
41 4.Hence empirical laws cannot be relied on beyond the limits of actual experience
41 5.Generalizations which rest only on the Method of Agreement can only be received as empirical laws
43 6.Signs from which an observed uniformity of sequence may be presumed to be resolvable
44 7.Two kinds of empirical laws
47Chapter XVII. Of Chance, and its Elimination.
§
1.The proof of empirical laws depends on the theory of chance
49 2.Chance defined and characterized
50 3.The elimination of chance
55 4.Discovery of residual phenomena by eliminating chance
57 5.The doctrine of chances
59Chapter XVIII. Of the Calculation of Chances.
§
1.Foundation of the doctrine of chances, as taught by mathematics
61 2.The doctrine tenable
63 3.On what foundation it really rests
64 4.Its ultimate dependence on causation
68 5.Theorem of the doctrine of chances which relates to the cause of a given event
72 6.How applicable to the elimination of chance
74Chapter XIX. Of the Extension of Derivative Laws to Adjacent Cases.
§
1.Derivative laws, when not casual, are almost always contingent on collocations
78 2.On what grounds they can be extended to cases beyond the bounds of actual experience
80 3.Those cases must be adjacent cases
82Chapter XX. Of Analogy.
§
1.Various senses of the word analogy
86 2.Nature of analogical evidence
87 3.On what circumstances its value depends
91Chapter XXI. Of the Evidence of the Law of Universal Causation.
§
1.The law of causality does not rest on an instinct
95 2.But on an induction by simple enumeration
100 3.In what cases such induction is allowable
102 4.The universal prevalence of the law of causality, on what grounds admissible
105Chapter XXII. Of Uniformities of Coexistence not dependent on Causation.
§
1.Uniformities of coexistence which result from laws of sequence
110 2.The properties of Kinds are uniformities of coexistence
111 3.Some are derivative, others ultimate
113 4.No universal axiom of coexistence
114 5.The evidence of uniformities of coexistence, how measured
117 6.When derivative, their evidence is that of empirical laws
117 7.So also when ultimate
119 8.The evidence stronger in proportion as the law is more general
120 9.Every distinct Kind must be examined
121Chapter XXIII. Of Approximate Generalizations, and Probable Evidence.
§
1.The inferences called probable, rest on approximate generalizations
124 2.Approximate generalizations less useful in science than in life
124 3.In what cases they may be resorted to
126 4.In what manner proved
127 5.With what precautions employed
130 6.The two modes of combining probabilities
131 7.How approximate generalizations may be converted into accurate generalizations equivalent to them
136Chapter XXIV. Of the Remaining Laws of Nature.
§
1.Propositions which assert mere existence
139 2.Resemblance, considered as a subject of science
141 3.The axioms and theorems of mathematics comprise the principal laws of resemblance
143 4.—and those of order in place, and rest on induction by simple enumeration
145 5.The propositions of arithmetic affirm the modes of formation of some given number
146 6.Those of algebra affirm the equivalence of different modes of formation of numbers generally
151 7.The propositions of geometry are laws of outward nature
154 8.Why geometry is almost entirely deductive
156 9.Function of mathematical truths in the other sciences, and limits of that function
158Chapter XXV. Of the Grounds of Disbelief.
§
1.Improbability and impossibility
161 2.Examination of Hume's doctrine of miracles
162 3.The degrees of improbability correspond to differences in the nature of the generalization with which an assertion conflicts
166 4.A fact is not incredible because the chances are against it
170 5.Are coincidences less credible than other facts?
172 6.An opinion of Laplace examined
175BOOK IV.
OF OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION.
Chapter I. Of Observation and Description.
§
1.Observation, how far a subject of logic
183 2.A great part of what seems observation is really inference
184 3.The description of an observation affirms more than is contained in the observation
187 4.—namely an agreement among phenomena; and the comparison of phenomena to ascertain such agreements is a preliminary to induction
190Chapter II. Of Abstraction, or the Formation of Conceptions.
§
1.The comparison which is a preliminary to induction implies general conceptions
193 2.—but these need not be pre-existent
194 3.A general conception, originally the result of a comparison, becomes itself the type of comparison
198 4.What is meant by appropriate conceptions
200 5.—and by clear conceptions
203 6.Further illustration of the subject
205Chapter III. Of Naming, as subsidiary to Induction.
§
1.The fundamental property of names as an instrument of thought
209 2.Names are not indispensable to induction
210 3.In what manner subservient to it
211 4.General names not a mere contrivance to economize the use of language
213Chapter IV. Of the Requisites of a Philosophical Language, and the Principles of Definition.
§
1.First requisite of philosophical language, a steady and determinate meaning for every general name
215 2.Names in common use have often a loose connotation
215 3.—which the logician should fix, with as little alteration as possible
218 4.Why definition is often a question not of words but of things
220 5.How the logician should deal with the transitive applications of words
224 6.Evil consequences of casting off any portion of the customary connotation of words
229Chapter V. On the Natural History of the Variations in the Meaning of Terms.
§
1.How circumstances originally accidental become incorporated into the meaning of words
236 2.—and sometimes become the whole meaning
238 3.Tendency of words to become generalized
240 4.—and to become specialized
243Chapter VI. The Principles of a Philosophical Language further considered.
§
1.Second requisite of philosophical language, a name for every important meaning
248 2.—viz. first, an accurate descriptive terminology
248 3.—secondly, a name for each of the more important results of scientific abstraction
252 4.—thirdly, a nomenclature, or system of the names of Kinds
255 5.Peculiar nature of the connotation of names which belong to a nomenclature
257 6.In what cases language may, and may not, be used mechanically
259Chapter VII. Of Classification, as subsidiary to Induction.
§
1.Classification as here treated of, wherein different from the classification implied in naming
266 2.Theory of natural groups
267 3.Are natural groups given by type, or by definition?
271 4.Kinds are natural groups
274 5.How the names of Kinds should be constructed
280Chapter VIII. Of Classification by Series.
§
1.Natural groups should be arranged in a natural series
284 2.The arrangement should follow the degrees of the main phenomenon
285 3.—which implies the assumption of a type-species
287 4.How the divisions of the series should be determined
288 5.Zoology affords the completest type of scientific classification
289BOOK V.
ON FALLACIES.
Chapter I. Of Fallacies in General.
§
1.Theory of fallacies a necessary part of logic
295 2.Casual mistakes are not fallacies
297 3.The moral sources of erroneous opinion, how related to the intellectual
297Chapter II. Classification of Fallacies.
§
1.On what criteria a classification of fallacies should be grounded
301 2.The five classes of fallacies
302 3.The reference of a fallacy to one or another class is sometimes arbitrary
305Chapter III. Fallacies of Simple Inspection, or à priori Fallacies.
§
1.Character of this class of Fallacies
309 2.Natural prejudice of mistaking subjective laws for objective, exemplified in popular superstitions
310 3.Natural prejudices, that things which we think of together must exist together, and that what is inconceivable must be false
314 4.Natural prejudice, of ascribing objective existence to abstractions
321 5.Fallacy of the Sufficient Reason
322 6.Natural prejudice, that the differences in nature correspond to the distinctions in language
325 7.Prejudice, that a phenomenon cannot have more than one cause
329 8.Prejudice, that the conditions of a phenomenon must resemble the phenomenon
332Chapter IV. Fallacies of Observation.
§
1.Non-observation, and Mal-observation
341 2.Non-observation of instances, and non-observation of circumstances
341 3.Examples of the former
342 4.—and of the latter
347 5.Mal-observation characterized and exemplified
352Chapter V. Fallacies of Generalization.
§
1.Character of the class
356 2.Certain kinds of generalization must always be groundless
356 3.Attempts to resolve phenomena radically different into the same
357 4.Fallacy of mistaking empirical for causal laws
359 5. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc; and the deductive fallacy corresponding to it
364 6.Fallacy of False Analogies
366 7.Function of metaphors in reasoning
373 8.How fallacies of generalization grow out of bad classification
375Chapter VI. Fallacies of Ratiocination.
§
1.Introductory Remarks
377 2.Fallacies in the conversion and æquipollency of propositions
377 3.Fallacies in the syllogistic process
379 4.Fallacy of changing the premises
379Chapter VII. Fallacies of Confusion.
§
1.Fallacy of Ambiguous Terms
384 2.Fallacy of Petitio Principii
396 3.Fallacy of Ignoratio Elenchi
405BOOK VI.
ON THE LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES.
Chapter I. Introductory Remarks.
§
1.The backward state of the Moral Sciences can only be remedied by applying to them the methods of Physical Science, duly extended and generalized
413 2.How far this can be attempted in the present work
415Chapter II. Of Liberty and Necessity.
§
1.Are human actions subject to the law of causality?
417 2.The doctrine commonly called Philosophical Necessity, in what sense true
418 3.Inappropriateness and pernicious effect of the term Necessity
420 4.A motive not always the anticipation of a pleasure or a pain
424Chapter III. That there is, or may be, a Science of Human Nature.
§
1.There may be sciences which are not exact sciences
426 2.To what scientific type the Science of Human Nature corresponds
429Chapter IV. Of the Laws of Mind.
§
1.What is meant by Laws of Mind
432 2.Is there a science of Psychology?
433 3.The principal investigations of Psychology characterized
435 4.Relation of mental facts to physical conditions
440Chapter V. Of Ethology, or the Science of the Formation of Character.
§
1.The Empirical Laws of Human Nature
445 2.—are merely approximate generalizations. The universal laws are those of the formation of character
447 3.The laws of the formation of character cannot be ascertained by observation and experiment
449 4.—but must be studied deductively
454 5.The Principles of Ethology are the
axiomata mediaof mental science
455 6.Ethology characterized
459Chapter VI. General Considerations on the Social Science.
§
1.Are Social Phenomena a subject of Science?
461 2.Of what nature the Social Science must be
463Chapter VII. Of the Chemical, or Experimental, Method in the Social Science.
§
1.Characters of the mode of thinking which deduces political doctrines from specific experience
466 2.In the Social Science experiments are impossible
468 3.—the Method of Difference inapplicable
469 4.—and the Methods of Agreement, and of Concomitant Variations, inconclusive
471 5.The Method of Residues also inconclusive, and presupposes Deduction
472Chapter VIII. Of the Geometrical, or Abstract Method.
§
1.Characters of this mode of thinking
476 2.Examples of the Geometrical Method
478 3.The interest-philosophy of the Bentham school
479Chapter IX. Of the Physical, or Concrete Deductive Method.
§
1.The Direct and Inverse Deductive Methods
486 2.Difficulties of the Direct Deductive Method in the Social Science
489 3.To what extent the different branches of sociological speculation can be studied apart. Political Economy characterized
492 4.Political Ethology, or the science of national character
497 5.The Empirical Laws of the Social Science
500 6.The Verification of the Social Science
502Chapter X. Of the Inverse Deductive, or Historical Method.
§
1.Distinction between the general Science of Society, and special sociological inquiries
506 2.What is meant by a State of Society?
506 3.The Progressiveness of Man and Society
508 4.The laws of the succession of states of society can only be ascertained by the Inverse Deductive Method
511 5.Social Statics, or the science of the Coexistences of Social Phenomena
513 6.Social Dynamics, or the science of the Successions of Social Phenomena
521 7.Outlines of the Historical Method
522 8.Future prospects of Sociological Inquiry
525Chapter XI. Additional Elucidations of the Science of History.
§
1.The subjection of historical facts to uniform laws is verified by statistics
529 2.—does not imply the insignificance of moral causes
532 3.—nor the inefficacy of the characters of individuals and of the acts of governments
535 4.The historical importance of eminent men and of the policy of governments illustrated
540Chapter XII. Of the Logic of Practice, or Art; including Morality and Policy.
§
1.Morality not a science, but an Art
544 2.Relation between rules of art and the theorems of the corresponding science
544 3.What is the proper function of rules of art?
546 4.Art cannot be Deductive
548 5.Every Art consists of truths of Science, arranged in the order suitable for some practical use
549 6.Teleology, or the Doctrine of Ends
550 7.Necessity of an ultimate standard, or first principle of Teleology
552 8.Conclusion
554generally mislead us, sometimes do; and must make up, as far as possible, for the incomplete conclusiveness of any one indication, by obtaining others to corroborate it. The principles of induction applicable to approximate generalization are therefore a not less important subject of inquiry, than the rules for the investigation of universal truths; and might reasonably be expected to detain us almost as long, were it not that these principles are mere corollaries from those which have been already treated of.
we know well enough what circumstances distinguish the portion of A which has the attribute B from the portion which has it not, but have no means, or have not time, to examine whether those characteristic circumstances exist or not in the individual case. This is the situation we are generally in when the inquiry is of the kind called moral, that is, of the kind which has in view to predict human actions. To enable us to affirm anything universally concerning the actions of classes of human beings, the classification must be grounded on the circumstances of their mental culture and habits, which in an individual case are seldom exactly known; and classes grounded on these distinctions would never precisely accord with those into which mankind are divided for social purposes. All propositions which can be framed respecting the actions of human beings as ordinarily classified, or as classified according to any kind of outward indications, are merely approximate. We can only say, Most persons of a particular age, profession, country, or rank in society, have such and such qualities; or, Most persons when placed in certain circumstances act in such and such a way. Not that we do not often know well enough on what causes the qualities depend, or what sort of persons they are who act in that particular way; but we have seldom the means of knowing whether any individual person has been under the influence of those causes, or is a person of that particular sort. We could replace the approximate generalizations by propositions universally true; but these would hardly ever be capable of being applied to practice. We should be sure of our majors, but we should not be able to get minors to fit: we are forced, therefore, to draw our conclusions from coarser and more fallible indications.
that a wrong empirical law will emerge instead of the right one. Accordingly, the most erroneous generalizations are continually made from the course of history: not only in this country, where history cannot yet be said to be at all cultivated as a science, but in other countries, where it is so cultivated, and by persons well versed in it. The only check or corrective is, constant verification by psychological and ethological laws. We may add to this, that no one but a person competently skilled in those laws is capable of preparing the materials for historical generalization, by analysing the facts of history, or even by observing the social phenomena of his own time. No other will be aware of the comparative importance of different facts, nor consequently know what facts to look for, or to observe; still less will he be capable of estimating the evidence of facts which, as is the case with most, cannot be ascertained by direct observation or learnt from testimony, but must be inferred from marks.
than either of the others, though it may have all of those circumstances in common with either one or the other of them. Its prosperity may be partly owing to circumstances common to it with one of those nations, and partly with the other, while they, having each of them only half the number of favourable circumstances, have remained inferior. So that the closest imitation which can be made, in the social science, of a legitimate induction from direct experience, gives but a specious semblance of conclusiveness, without any real value.
eliminated. Now, in the case of political phenomena, the supposition of unity of cause is not only wide of the truth, but at an immeasurable distance from it. The causes of every social phenomenon which we are particularly interested about, security, wealth, freedom, good government, public virtue, general intelligence, or their opposites, are infinitely numerous: especially the external or remote causes, which alone are, for the most part, accessible to direct observation. No one cause suffices of itself to produce any of these phenomena; while there are countless causes which have some influence over them, and may co-operate either in their production or in their prevention. From the mere fact, therefore, of our having been able to eliminate some circumstance, we can by no means infer that this circumstance was not instrumental to the effect in some of the very instances from which we have eliminated it. We can conclude that the effect is sometimes produced without it; but not that, when present, it does not contribute its share.
illud non continuo, ut æque incontentæ." The Stoic resumes: "Ut enim, inquit, gubernator æque peccat, si palcarum navem evertit, et si auri; item æque peccat qui parentem, et qui servum, injuriâ verberat;" assuming, that because the magnitude of the interest at stake makes no difference in the mere defect of skill, it can make none in the moral defect: a false analogy. Again, "Quis ignorat, si plures ex alto emergere velint, propius fore eos quidem ad respirandum, qui ad summam jam aquam appropinquant, sed nihilo magis respirare posse, quam eos, qui sunt in profundo? Nihil ergo adjuvat procedere, et progredi in virtute, quominus miserrimus sit, antequam ad eam pervenerit, quoniam in aquâ nihil adjuvat: et quoniam catuli, qui jam despecturi sunt, cæci æque, et ii qui modo nati; Platonem quoque necesse est, quoniam nondum videbat sapientiam, æque cæcum animo, ac Phalarim fuisse." Cicero, in his own person, combats these false analogies by other analogies tending to an opposite conclusion. "Ista similia non sunt, Cato.... Illa sunt similia; hebes acies est cuipiam oculorum: corpore alius languescit: hi curatione adhibitâ levantur in dies: alter valet plus quotidie: alter videt. Hi similes sunt omnibus, qui virtuti student; levantur vitiis, levantur erroribus."
peculiarly designated as mental: and by the laws of mind, I mean the laws according to which those feelings generate one another.
necessary to say anything either in proof or in illustration of the assertion that such is not the true character of the social phenomena. There is not, among these most complex and (for that reason) most modifiable of all phenomena, any one over which innumerable forces do not exercise influence; which does not depend on a conjunction of very many causes. We have not, therefore, to prove the notion in question to be an error, but to prove that the error has been committed; that so mistaken a conception of the mode in which the phenomena of society are produced, has actually been ascertained.
froth and straws floating on its surface, while more weighty objects sink to the bottom; this, even if the assertion illustrated by it were true, would be no good illustration, there being no parity of cause. The levity by which substances float on a stream, and the levity which is synonymous with worthlessness, have nothing in common except the name; and (to show how little value there is in the metaphor) we need only change the word into buoyancy, to turn the semblance of argument involved in Bacon's illustration against himself.
any phenomena more general, there is a distinct and separate Science of Mind.
founded on fear; that the dread of each other is the one motive by which human beings were originally brought into a state of society, and are still held in it. Some of the earlier scientific inquirers into politics, in particular Hobbes, assumed this proposition, not by implication, but avowedly, as the foundation of their doctrine, and attempted to build a complete philosophy of politics thereupon. It is true that Hobbes did not find this one maxim sufficient to carry him through the whole of his subject, but was obliged to eke it out by the double sophism of an original contract. I call this a double sophism; first, as passing off a fiction for a fact, and, secondly, assuming a practical principle, or precept, as the basis of a theory; which is a petitio principii, since (as we noticed in treating of that Fallacy) every rule of conduct, even though it be so binding a one as the observance of a promise, must rest its own foundations on the theory of the subject, and the theory, therefore, cannot rest upon it.
the power, at our choice, for practical ends, seemed by no means hopeless.
not be those which serve best to mark out the class from all others. We should therefore select from among the common properties, (if among them any such are to be found,) those on which it has been ascertained by experience, or proved by deduction, that many others depend; or at least which are sure marks of them, and from whence, therefore, many others will follow by inference. We thus see that to frame a good definition of a name already in use, is not a matter of choice but of discussion, and discussion not merely respecting the usage of language, but respecting the properties of things, and even the origin of those properties. And hence every enlargement of our knowledge of the objects to which the name is applied, is liable to suggest an improvement in the definition. It is impossible to frame a perfect set of definitions on any subject, until the theory of the subject is perfect: and as science makes progress, its definitions are also progressive.
a first-rate authority) have thought that no other property so well answers the conditions required for the definition.
of civilization. On the other part, the great variety of influences special to the individual: his temperament, and other peculiarities of organization, his parentage, habitual associates, temptations, and so forth. If we now take the whole of the instances which occur within a sufficiently large field to exhaust all the combinations of these special influences, or in other words, to eliminate chance; and if all these instances have occurred within such narrow limits of time, that no material change can have taken place in the general influences constituting the state of civilization of the country; we may be certain, that if human actions are governed by invariable laws, the aggregate result will be something like a constant quantity. The number of murders committed within that space and time, being the effect partly of general causes which have not varied, and partly of partial causes the whole round of whose variations has been included, will be, practically speaking, invariable.
when people call anything beautiful, they think they are asserting more than that it is merely agreeable. They think they are ascribing a peculiar sort of agreeableness, analogous to that which they find in some other of the things to which they are accustomed to apply the same name. If, therefore, there be any peculiar sort of agreeableness which is common though not to all, yet to the principal things which are called beautiful, it is better to limit the denotation of the term to those things, than to leave that kind of quality without a term to connote it, and thereby divert attention from its peculiarities.
shall presently endeavour to show the importance, I cannot but think that this truth is enunciated in too unlimited a manner, and that there is considerable scope in sociological inquiry for the direct, as well as for the inverse, Deductive Method.
preceding chapter. The intellectual changes are the most conspicuous agents in history, not from their superior force, considered in themselves, but because practically they work with the united power belonging to all three.
that cause: if they are effects of different causes, they cannot coexist unless it be because their causes coexist; and the uniformity of coexistence, if such there be, between the effects, proves that those particular causes, within the limits of our observation, have uniformly been coexistent.
certainty be considered ultimate; and of these the ultimate properties are probably much more numerous that we at present recognise, since every successful instance of the resolution of the properties of their compounds into simpler laws, generally leads to the recognition of properties in the elements distinct from any previously known. The resolution of the laws of the heavenly motions, established the previously unknown ultimate property of a mutual attraction between all bodies: the resolution, so far as it has yet proceeded, of the laws of crystallization, of chemical composition, electricity, magnetism, &c., points to various polarities, ultimately inherent in the particles of which bodies are composed; the comparative atomic weights of different kinds of bodies were ascertained by resolving, into more general laws, the uniformities observed in the proportions in which substances combine with one another; and so forth. Thus although every resolution of a complex uniformity into simpler and more elementary laws has an apparent tendency to diminish the number of the ultimate properties, and really does remove many properties from the list; yet, (since the result of this simplifying process is to trace up an ever greater variety of different effects to the same agents,) the further we advance in this direction, the greater number of distinct properties we are forced to recognise in one and the same object: the coexistences of which properties must accordingly be ranked among the ultimate generalities of nature.
these only that the coexistences can be classed as a peculiar sort of laws of nature.
produced in that case. But we must remember that a degree of knowledge far short of the power of actual prediction, is often of much practical value. There may be great power of influencing phenomena, with a very imperfect knowledge of the causes by which they are in any given instance determined. It is enough that we know that certain means have a tendency to produce a given effect, and that others have a tendency to frustrate it. When the circumstances of an individual or of a nation are in any considerable degree under our control, we may, by our knowledge of tendencies, be enabled to shape those circumstances in a manner much more favourable to the ends we desire, than the shape which they would of themselves assume. This is the limit of our power; but within this limit the power is a most important one.
is any connexion between a and A, since a may have many causes, and may have been produced, in these different instances, not by anything which the instances had in common, but by some of those elements in them which were different. We nevertheless observed, that in proportion to the multiplication of instances pointing to A as the antecedent, the characteristic uncertainty of the method diminishes, and the existence of a law of connexion between A and a more nearly approaches to certainty. It is now to be determined, after what amount of experience this certainty may be deemed to be practically attained, and the connexion between A and a may be received as an empirical law.
at least as much industry as A employs during the whole of his career, but coming back with increase by the sale of the goods which have been manufactured or imported, forms a fund for the employment of the same and perhaps a greater quantity of labour in perpetuity. But the observer does not see, and therefore does not consider, what becomes of B's money; he does see what is done with A's: he observes the amount of industry which A's profusion feeds; he observes not the far greater quantity which it prevents from being fed; and thence the prejudice, universal to the time of Adam Smith, that prodigality encourages industry, and parsimony is a discouragement to it.
recognise as realities; and realities, too, of a higher order than the phenomena of our consciousness, being the efficient causes and necessary substrata of all Phenomena. Among these entities they reckon Substances, whether matter or spirit; from the dust under our feet to the soul, and from that to Deity. All these, according to them, are preternatural or supernatural beings, having no likeness in experience, though experience is entirely a manifestation of their agency. Their existence, together with more or less of the laws to which they conform in their operations, are, on this theory, apprehended and recognised as real by the mind itself intuitively: experience (whether in the form of sensation or of mental feeling) having no other part in the matter than as affording facts which are consistent with these necessary postulates of reason, and which are explained and accounted for by them.
science. The remaining chapters are an endeavour to facilitate this most desirable object.
contingent on collocations; and are hence subject to the characteristic infirmity of empirical laws, that of being admissible only where the collocations are known by experience to be such as are requisite for the truth of the law, that is, only within the conditions of time and place confirmed by actual observation.
regard to the presence or absence of A, will exist in one case out of those three. There will therefore be, of the whole number of cases, two in which A exists without B; one case of B without A; two in which neither B nor A exists, and one case out of six in which they both exist. If then, in point of fact, they are found to coexist oftener than in one case out of six; and, consequently, A does not exist without B so often as twice in three times, nor B without A so often as once in every twice; there is some cause in existence which tends to produce a conjunction between A and B.
for aught we know, may be entirely different, or may succeed one another according to different laws, or even according to no fixed law at all. Such, again, in matters dependent on causation, are all universal negatives, all propositions that assert impossibility. The non-existence of any given phenomenon, however uniformly experience may as yet have testified to the fact, proves at most that no cause, adequate to its production, has yet manifested itself; but that no such causes exist in nature can only be inferred if we are so foolish as to suppose that we know all the forces in nature. The supposition would at least be premature while our acquaintance with some even of those which we do know is so extremely recent. And however much our knowledge of nature may hereafter be extended, it is not easy to see how that knowledge could ever be complete, or how, if it were, we could ever be assured of its being so.
what, in the present case, these words mean, and how far and in what circumstances the properties which they express are sufficient grounds for disbelief.
superstitions as these last must be the result of study; they are too recondite for natural or spontaneous growth. But when the attempt was once made to construct a science of predictions, any association, though ever so faint or remote, by which an object could be connected in however far-fetched a manner with ideas either of prosperity or of danger and misfortune, was enough to determine its being classed among good or evil omens.
done, but in all probability not until some one had again been found with the qualities of Columbus or Newton. Because any one great man might have had his place supplied by other great men, the argument concludes that all great men could have been dispensed with. The term "great men" is distributive in the premises and collective in the conclusion.
well established. Let it be shown, for instance, that the most complex series of physical causes and effects succeed one another in the eye and in the brain to produce a sensation of colour; rays falling on the eye, refracted, converging, crossing one another, making an inverted image on the retina, and after this a motion—let it be a vibration, or a rush of nervous fluid, or whatever else you are pleased to suppose, along the optic nerve—a propagation of this motion to the brain itself, and as many more different motions as you choose; still, at the end of these motions, there is something which is not motion, there is a feeling or sensation of colour. Whatever number of motions we may be able to interpolate, and whether they be real or imaginary, we shall still find, at the end of the series, a motion antecedent and a colour consequent. The mode in which any one of the motions produces the next, might possibly be susceptible of explanation by some general law of motion; but the mode in which the last motion produces the sensation of colour, cannot be explained by any law of motion; it is the law of colour: which is, and must always remain, a peculiar thing. Where our consciousness recognises between two phenomena an inherent distinction; where we are sensible of a difference which is not merely of degree, and feel that no adding one of the phenomena to itself would produce the other; any theory which attempts to bring either under the laws of the other must be false; though a theory which merely treats the one as a cause or condition of the other, may possibly be true.
those groups in such an order, as will best conduce to the remembrance and to the ascertainment of their laws.
arising from the irregular changes in the state of the atmosphere, was discovered by comparing the average height of the barometer at different hours of the day. When this comparison was made, it was found that there was a small difference, which on the average was constant, however the absolute quantities might vary, and which difference, therefore, must be the effect of a constant cause. This cause was afterwards ascertained, deductively, to be the rarefaction of the air, occasioned by the increase of temperature as the day advances.
universe as being on the whole carried on by general laws, and not by special interpositions. To whoever holds this belief, there is a general presumption against any supposition of divine agency not operating through general laws, or in other words, there is an antecedent improbability in every miracle, which, in order to outweigh it, requires an extraordinary strength of antecedent probability derived from the special circumstances of the case.
in which the two cases resemble, may be capable of being shown to be the material circumstance; to be that on which all the consequences, necessary to be taken into account in the particular discussion, depend. In the example last given, the resemblance is one of relation; the fundamentum relationis being the management by a few persons, of affairs in which a much greater number are interested along with them. Now, some may contend that this circumstance which is common to the two cases, and the various consequences which follow from it, have the chief share in determining all the effects which make up what we term good or bad administration. If they can establish this, their argument has the force of a rigorous induction; if they cannot, they are said to have failed in proving the analogy between the two cases; a mode of speech which implies that when the analogy can be proved, the argument founded on it cannot be resisted.
wanted to study, spontaneous motion; while it did include cases of the absence of the phenomenon, cases of motion not spontaneous. The conception was hence "inappropriate." We may add that, in the case in question, no conception would be appropriate; there is no agreement which runs through all the cases of spontaneous or apparently spontaneous motion and no others: they cannot be brought under one law: it is a case of Plurality of Causes.
observing minutely and comparing carefully a particular class of phenomena, and an accurate memory for the results of the observation and comparison, so will his conceptions of that class of phenomena be clear; provided he has the indispensable habit, (naturally, however, resulting from those other endowments,) of never using general names without a precise connotation.
perceptions are unhealthy. Some particular mode of conduct or feeling is affirmed to be unnatural; why? because it is abhorrent to the universal and natural sentiments of mankind. Finding no such sentiment in yourself, you question the fact; and the answer is (if your antagonist is polite), that you are an exception, a peculiar case. But neither (say you) do I find in the people of some other country, or of some former age, any such feeling of abhorrence; "ay, but their feelings were sophisticated and unhealthy."
to direct us but the approximate generalization, that truth is more common than falsehood, or, in other words, that most persons, on most occasions, speak truth. But if we consider in what circumstances the cases where truth is spoken differ from those in which it is not, we find, for instance, the following: the witness's being an honest person or not; his being an accurate observer or not; his having an interest to serve in the matter or not. Now, not only may we be able to obtain other approximate generalizations respecting the degree of frequency of these various possibilities, but we may know which of them is positively realized in the individual case. That the witness has or has not an interest to serve, we perhaps know directly; and the other two points indirectly, by means of marks; as, for example, from his conduct on some former occasion; or from his reputation, which, though a very uncertain mark, affords an approximate generalization (as, for instance, Most persons who are believed to be honest by those with whom they have had frequent dealings, are really so) which approaches nearer to an universal truth than the approximate general proposition with which we set out, viz. Most persons on most occasions speak truth.
there will be one chance in ten of error in assuming that any A, not individually known to us, is a B: but this of course holds only within the limits of time, place, and circumstance, embraced in the observations, and therefore cannot be counted on for any sub-class or variety of A (or for A in any set of external circumstances) which were not included in the average. It must be added, that we can guide ourselves by the proposition, Nine out of every ten A are B, only in cases of which we know nothing except that they fall within the class A. For if we know, of any particular instance i, not only that it falls under A, but to what species or variety of A it belongs, we shall generally err in applying to i the average struck for the whole genus, from which the average corresponding to that species alone would, in all probability, materially differ. And so if i, instead of being a particular sort of instance, is an instance known to be under the influence of a particular set of circumstances. The presumption drawn from the numerical proportions in the whole genus would probably, in such a case, only mislead. A general average should only be applied to cases which are neither known, nor can be presumed, to be other than average cases. Such averages, therefore, are commonly of little use for the practical guidance of any affairs but those which concern large numbers. Tables of the chances of life are useful to insurance offices, but they go a very little way towards informing any one of the chances of his own life, or any other life in which he is interested, since almost every life is either better or worse than the average. Such averages can only be considered as supplying the first term in a series of approximations; the subsequent terms proceeding on an appreciation of the circumstances belonging to the particular case.
Inductive Method, that we should establish a type-species or genus, namely, the one which exhibits in the most eminent degree the particular phenomenon under investigation. But of this hereafter. It remains, for completing the theory of natural groups, that a few words should be said on the principles of the nomenclature adapted to them.
Let the proposition, Most A are B, be true of nine in ten; Most B are C, of eight in nine: then not only will one A in ten not be C, because not B, but even of the nine-tenths which are B, only eight-ninths will be C: that is, the cases of A which are C will be only 8/9 of 9/10, or four-fifths. Let us now add Most C are D, and suppose this to be true of seven cases out of eight; the proportion of A which is D will be only 7/8 of 8/9 of 9/10, or 7/10. Thus the probability progressively dwindles. The experience, however, on which our approximate generalizations are grounded, has so rarely been subjected to, or admits of, accurate numerical estimation, that we cannot in general apply any measurement to the diminution of probability which takes place at each illation; but must be content with remembering that it does diminish at every step, and that unless the premises approach very nearly indeed to being universally true, the conclusion after a very few steps is worth nothing. A hearsay of a hearsay, or an argument from presumptive evidence depending not on immediate marks but on marks of marks, is worthless at a very few removes from the first stage.
of it, since mankind were not prompted by any urgent motive to continue making a distinction in their language between bad men of servile station and bad men of any other rank in life.
in virtue of which one thing is recognised by the mind, either rightly or erroneously, as evidence of another thing. In regard to Desire, they will have to examine what objects we desire naturally, and by what causes we are made to desire things originally indifferent, or even disagreeable to us; and so forth. It may be remarked, that the general laws of association prevail among these more intricate states of mind, in the same manner as among the simpler ones. A desire, an emotion, an idea of the higher order of abstraction, even our judgments and volitions when they have become habitual, are called up by association, according to precisely the same laws as our simple ideas.
of which is likely to throw most light upon the particular subject. That subject being the laws of some phenomenon or some set of connected phenomena; the very phenomenon or set of phenomena in question must be chosen as the groundwork of the classification.
travellers, and in general those who speak or write concerning moral and social phenomena with which they are not familiarly acquainted, are the great agents in this modification of language. The vocabulary of all except unusually instructed as well as thinking persons, is, on such subjects, eminently scanty. They have a certain small set of words to which they are accustomed, and which they employ to express phenomena the most heterogeneous, because they have never sufficiently analysed the facts to which those words correspond in their own country, to have attached perfectly definite ideas to the words. The first English conquerors of Bengal, for example, carried with them the phrase landed proprietor into a country where the rights of individuals over the soil were extremely different in degree, and even in nature, from those recognised in England. Applying the term with all its English associations in such a state of things; to one who had only a limited right they gave an absolute right, from another because he had not an absolute right they took away all right, drove whole classes of people to ruin and despair, filled the country with banditti, created a feeling that nothing was secure, and produced, with the best intentions, a disorganization of society which had not been produced in that country by the most ruthless of its barbarian invaders. Yet the usage of persons capable of so gross a misapprehension, determines the meaning of language; and the words they thus misuse grow in generality, until the instructed are obliged to acquiesce; and to employ those words (first freeing them from vagueness by giving them a definite connotation) as generic terms, subdividing the genera into species.
laws of animal life. And the classification of animals best suited to that one purpose, is the most suitable to all the other purposes of zoological science.
the discovery of the conditions and laws of the general phenomenon of life, which is common to man with those inferior animals. And they are, even, rightly considered as properties of animated nature itself; because they may evidently be affiliated to the general laws of animated nature; because we may fairly presume that some rudiments or feeble degrees of those properties would be recognised in all animals by more perfect organs, or even by more perfect instruments, than ours; and because those may be correctly termed properties of a class, which a thing exhibits exactly in proportion as it belongs to the class, that is, in proportion as it possesses the main attributes constitutive of the class.
consider, not how or what to observe, but under what conditions observation is to be relied on; what is needful, in order that the fact, supposed to be observed, may safely be received as true.
each of them corresponding to a definite portion of the scale. In like manner each family should, if possible, be so subdivided, that one portion of it shall stand higher and the other lower, though of course contiguous, in the general scale; and only when this is impossible is it allowable to ground the remaining subdivisions on characters having no determinable connexion with the main phenomenon.
consciousness, namely, its outward feelings or sensations, and its inward feelings—its thoughts, emotions, and volitions. Whether anything else remains, or all else is inference from this; whether the mind is capable of directly perceiving or apprehending anything except states of its own consciousness—is a problem of metaphysics not to be discussed in this place. But after excluding all questions on which metaphysicians differ, it remains true, that for most purposes the discrimination we are called upon practically to exercise is that between sensations or other feelings, of our own or of other people, and inferences drawn from them. And on the theory of Observation this is all which seems necessary to be said for the purposes of the present work.
atoms of acid required to neutralize one atom of any base, is equal to the number of atoms of oxygen in the base: that the solubility of substances in one another, depends
to compel it to do so is the most effectual method of detecting and exposing it.
If we desire a nearer approach to concrete truth, we can only aim at it by taking, or endeavouring to take, a greater number of individualizing circumstances into the computation.
can be, to a certain extent, reduced to regularity and law. And the belief that they can be so, is equally consistent with assigning very great, or very little efficacy, to the influence of exceptional men, or of the acts of governments. And the same may be said of all other accidents and disturbing causes.
state as in India. They are inapplicable where the agricultural labourer is generally the owner both of the land itself and of the capital, as frequently in France, or of the capital only, as in Ireland." But though it may often be very justly objected to the existing race of political economists "that they attempt to construct a permanent fabric out of transitory materials; that they take for granted the immutability of arrangements of society, many of which are in their nature fluctuating or progressive, and enunciate with as little qualification as if they were universal and absolute truths, propositions which are perhaps applicable to no state of society except the particular one in which the writer happened to live;" this does not take away the value of the propositions, considered with reference to the state of society from which they were drawn. And even as applicable to other states of society, "it must not be supposed that the science is so incomplete and unsatisfactory as this might seem to prove. Though many of its conclusions are only locally true, its method of investigation is applicable universally; and as whoever has solved a certain number of algebraic equations, can without difficulty solve all others of the same kind, so whoever knows the political economy of England, or even of Yorkshire, knows that of all nations, actual or possible, provided he have good sense enough not to expect the same conclusion to issue from varying premises." Whoever is thoroughly master of the laws which, under free competition, determine the rent, profits, and wages, received by landlords, capitalists, and labourers, in a state of society in which the three classes are completely separate, will have no difficulty in determining the very different laws which regulate the distribution of the produce among the classes interested in it, in any of the states of cultivation and landed property set forth in the foregoing extract.
into which the diversities of character between different nations or different times enter as influencing causes only in a secondary degree. Those phenomena, on the contrary, with which the influences of the ethological state of the people are mixed up at every step (so that the connexion of effects and causes cannot be even rudely marked out without taking those influences into consideration) could not with any advantage, nor without great disadvantage, be treated independently of political ethology, nor, therefore, of all the circumstances by which the qualities of a people are influenced. For this reason (as well as for others which will hereafter appear) there can be no separate Science of Government; that being the fact which, of all others, is most mixed up, both as cause and effect, with the qualities of the particular people or of the particular age. All questions respecting the tendencies of forms of government must stand part of the general science of society, not of any separate branch of it.
that one of the words was used and not the other on a particular occasion or in a particular social circle, will be sufficient to produce so strong an association between the word and some speciality of circumstances, that mankind abandon the use of it in any other case, and the speciality becomes part of its signification. The tide of custom first drifts the word on the shore of a particular meaning, then retires and leaves it there.
of observation, can only be relied on as applicable to unobserved cases, so long as there is reason to think that no change has taken place in any of the remote causes on which the immediate causes depend. In making use, therefore, of even the best statistical generalizations for the purpose of inferring (though it be only conjecturally) that the same empirical laws will hold in any new case, it is necessary that we be well acquainted with the remoter causes, in order that we may avoid applying the empirical law to cases which differ in any of the circumstances on which the truth of the law ultimately depends. And thus, even where conclusions derived from specific observation are available for practical inferences in new cases, it is necessary that the deductive science should stand sentinel over the whole process; that it should be constantly referred to, and its sanction obtained to every inference.
or effect to be studied, and having investigated its causes and conditions, sends it back to art with a theorem of the combination of circumstances by which it could be produced. Art then examines these combinations of circumstances, and according as any of them are or are not in human power, pronounces the end attainable or not. The only one of the premises, therefore, which Art supplies, is the original major premise, which asserts that the attainment of the given end is desirable. Science then lends to Art the proposition (obtained by a series of inductions or of deductions) that the performance of certain actions will attain the end. From these premises Art concludes that the performance of these actions is desirable, and finding it also practicable, converts the theorem into a rule or precept.
that a certain mode of action has been found by ourselves and others to be well adapted to the cases of most common occurrence; so that if it be unsuitable to the case in hand, the reason of its being so will be likely to arise from some unusual circumstance.
must be a right foundation for government, because a government thus constituted tends to produce certain beneficial effects. Inasmuch, however, as no government produces all possible beneficial effects, but all are attended with more or fewer inconveniences; and since these cannot usually be combated by means drawn from the very causes which produce them; it would be often a much stronger recommendation of some practical arrangement, that it does not follow from what is called the general principle of the government, than that it does. Under a government of legitimacy, the presumption is far rather in favour of institutions of popular origin; and in a democracy, in favour of arrangements tending to check the impetus of popular will. The line of argumentation so commonly mistaken in France for political philosophy, tends to the practical conclusion that we should exert our utmost efforts to aggravate, instead of alleviating, whatever are the characteristic imperfections of the system of institutions which we prefer, or under which we happen to live.
none of their properties are ultimate, but all of them derivative, and produced by causation. And the presumption is confirmed, by the fact that the properties which vary from one individual to another, also generally vary more or less at different times in the same individual; which variation, like any other event, supposes a cause, and implies, consequently, that the properties are not independent of causation.
well meriting the ridicule with which it is treated by practitioners, and wholly unsupported by the analogy of the art to which, from the nature of its subject, that of politics must be the most nearly allied. No one now supposes it possible that one remedy can cure all diseases, or even the same disease in all constitutions and habits of body.
that instant, the result assumes the form of an ascending series; a succession of sums, each greater than that which preceded it; and we have thus a progressive effect from the continued action of a cause.
necessarians, however they may in words disavow it. I am much mistaken if they habitually feel that the necessity which they recognise in actions is but uniformity of order, and capability of being predicted. They have a feeling as if there were at bottom a stronger tie between the volitions and their causes: as if, when they asserted that the will is governed by the balance of motives, they meant something more cogent than if they had only said, that whoever knew the motives, and our habitual susceptibilities to them, could predict how we should will to act. They commit, in opposition to their own scientific system, the very same mistake which their adversaries commit in obedience to theirs; and in consequence do really in some instances suffer those depressing consequences, which their opponents erroneously impute to the doctrine itself.
the succession between one state of society and another: for the proximate cause of every state of society is the state of society immediately preceding it. The fundamental problem, therefore, of the social science, is to find the laws according to which any state of society produces the state which succeeds it and takes its place. This opens the great and vexed question of the progressiveness of man and society; an idea involved in every just conception of social phenomena as the subject of a science.
and must so continue while the causes subsist and are not counteracted.
peculiar practical end. A farmer does not divide plants, like a botanist, into dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous, but into useful plants and weeds. A geologist divides fossils, not like a zoologist, into families corresponding to those of living species, but into fossils of the secondary and of the tertiary periods, above the coal and below the coal, &c. Whales are or are not fish, according to the purpose for which we are considering them. "If we are speaking of the internal structure and physiology of the animal, we must not call them fish; for in these respects they deviate widely from fishes: they have warm blood, and produce and suckle their young as land quadrupeds do. But this would not prevent our speaking of the whale fishery, and calling such animals fish on all occasions connected with this employment; for the relations thus rising depend upon the animal's living in the water, and being caught in a manner similar to other fishes. A plea that human laws which mention fish do not apply to whales, would be rejected at once by an intelligent judge."
past to times still to come, holds equally true of similar generalizations from present times to times past; when persons whose acquaintance with moral and social facts is confined to their own age, take the men and the things of that age for the type of men and things in general, and apply without scruple to the interpretation of the events of history, the empirical laws which represent sufficiently for daily guidance the common phenomena of human nature at that time and in that particular state of society. If examples are wanted, almost every historical work, until a very recent period, abounded in them. The same may be said of those who generalize empirically from the people of their own country to the people of other countries, as if human beings felt, judged, and acted, everywhere in the same manner.
which the word Necessity puts out of sight, namely the power of the mind to co-operate in the formation of its own character, has given to its adherents a practical feeling much nearer to the truth than has generally (I believe) existed in the minds of necessarians. The latter may have had a stronger sense of the importance of what human beings can do to shape the characters of one another; but the free-will doctrine has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a much stronger spirit of self-culture.
that it will not. But its probability to us means the degree of expectation of its occurrence, which we are warranted in entertaining by our present evidence.
variation of circumstances, an induction from specific experience is attainable; otherwise not. The question to be resolved is, therefore, whether the requisites for induction respecting the causes of political effects or the properties of political agents, are to be met with in history? including under the term, cotemporary history. And in order to give fixity to our conceptions, it will be advisable to suppose this question asked in reference to some special subject of political inquiry or controversy; such as that frequent topic of debate in the present century, the operation of restrictive and prohibitory commercial legislation upon national wealth. Let this, then, be the scientific question to be investigated by specific experience.
another, and if obliged to bet, should venture our stake on red, white, or black, with equal indifference. But should we be indifferent whether we betted for or against some one colour, as, for instance, white? Surely not. From the very fact that black and red are each of them separately equally probable to us with white, the two together must be twice as probable. We should in this case expect not-white rather than white, and so much rather, that we would lay two to one upon it. It is true, there might for aught we knew be more white balls than black and red together; and if so, our bet would, if we knew more, be seen to be a disadvantageous one. But so also, for aught we knew, might there be more red balls than black and white, or more black balls than white and red, and in such case the effect of additional knowledge would be to prove to us that our bet was more advantageous than we had supposed it to be. There is in the existing state of our knowledge a rational probability of two to one against white; a probability fit to be made a basis of conduct. No reasonable person would lay an even wager in favour of white, against black and red; though against black alone, or red alone, he might do so without imprudence.
be inherent in all things which exist, or which are said to be one, were enough to put an end to all intelligible discussion; especially since, with a just perception that the truths which philosophy pursues are general truths, it was soon laid down that these general substances were the only subjects of science, being immutable, while individual substances cognizable by the senses, being in a perpetual flux, could not be the subject of real knowledge. This misapprehension of the import of general language constitutes Mysticism, a word so much oftener written and spoken than understood. Whether in the Vedas, in the Platonists, or in the Hegelians, mysticism is neither more nor less than ascribing objective existence to the subjective creations of our own faculties, to ideas or feelings of the mind; and believing that by watching and contemplating these ideas of its own making, it can read in them what takes place in the world without.
which such an hypothesis was liable to betray the practitioner, received an awful illustration in the history of the memorable fever that raged at Leyden in the year 1699, and which consigned two-thirds of the population of that city to an untimely grave; an event which in a great measure depended upon the Professor Sylvius de la Boe, who having just embraced the chemical doctrines of Van Helmont, assigned the origin of the distemper to a prevailing acid, and declared that its cure could alone [only] be effected by the copious administration of absorbent and testaceous medicines."
knot, and which yet are clearly more connected with it than with any other. And even if there should be some species of which the place is dubious, and which appear to be equally bound to two generic types, it is easily seen that this would not destroy the reality of the generic groups, any more than the scattered trees of the intervening plain prevent our speaking intelligibly of the distinct forests of two separate hills.
which and the earth there is a much closer resemblance; which possess an atmosphere, clouds, consequently water (or some fluid analogous to it), and even give strong indications of snow in their polar regions; while the cold, or heat, though differing greatly on the average from ours, is, in some parts at least of those planets, possibly not more extreme than in some regions of our own which are habitable. To balance these agreements, the ascertained differences are chiefly in the average light and heat, velocity of rotation, density of material, intensity of gravity, and similar circumstances of a secondary kind. With regard to these planets, therefore, the argument of analogy gives a decided preponderance in favour of their resembling the earth in any of its derivative properties, such as that of having inhabitants; though, when we consider how immeasurably multitudinous are those of their properties which we are entirely ignorant of, compared with the few which we know, we can attach but trifling weight to any considerations of resemblance in which the known elements bear so inconsiderable a proportion to the unknown.
interest has been implicated—religious zeal, party feeling, vanity, or at least the passion for the marvellous, in persons strongly susceptible of it. When none of these or similar circumstances exist to account for the apparent strength of the testimony; and where the assertion is not in contradiction either to those universal laws which know no counteraction or anomaly, or to the generalizations next in comprehensiveness to them, but would only amount, if admitted, to the existence of an unknown cause or an anomalous Kind, in circumstances not so thoroughly explored but that it is credible that things hitherto unknown may still come to light; a cautious person will neither admit nor reject the testimony, but will wait for confirmation at other times and from other unconnected sources. Such ought to have been the conduct of the King of Siam when the Dutch travellers affirmed to him the existence of ice. But an ignorant person is as obstinate in his contemptuous incredulity as he is unreasonably credulous. Anything unlike his own narrow experience he disbelieves, if it flatters no propensity; any nursery tale is swallowed implicitly by him if it does.
whole a less departure from the ordinary course of events. Yet, on such grounds as this have able writers been led to the extraordinary conclusion, that nothing supported by credible testimony ought ever to be disbelieved.
must be laid for an evaluation of the chances, by possessing ourselves of the utmost attainable amount of positive knowledge. The knowledge required is that of the comparative frequency with which the different events in fact occur. For the purposes, therefore, of the present work, it is allowable to suppose, that conclusions respecting the probability of a fact of a particular kind, rest on our knowledge of the proportion between the cases in which facts of that kind occur, and those in which they do not occur: this knowledge being either derived from specific experiment, or deduced from our knowledge of the causes in operation which tend to produce, compared with those which tend to prevent, the fact in question.
any other law of the universe, is experience; it is simply that no other suppositions explain or are consistent with the facts of universal nature.
appearing, who profess either to have solved the problem, or to suggest modes in which it may one day be solved. Even where pretensions of this magnitude are not made, the character of the solutions which are given or sought of particular classes of phenomena, often involves such conceptions of what constitutes explanation, as would render the notion of explaining all phenomena whatever by means of some one cause or law, perfectly admissible.
it supplies us with classifications ready made, by which things are arranged (as far as the light of by-gone generations admits) with the objects to which they bear the greatest total resemblance. The number of general names in a language, and the degree of generality of those names, afford a test of the knowledge of the era, and of the intellectual insight which is the birthright of any one born into it."
belief or expectation which follows, and by which we recognise as having taken place, or as about to take place, that of which we have perceived a mark, there is evidently no need of language. And this inference of one particular fact from another is a case of induction. It is of this sort of induction that brutes are capable: it is in this shape that uncultivated minds make almost all their inductions, and that we all do so in the cases in which familiar experience forces our conclusions upon us without any active process of inquiry on our part, and in which the belief or expectation follows the suggestion of the evidence, with the promptitude and certainty of an instinct.
as likely to have been really thrown as the other series. If, therefore, this assertion is less credible than the other, the reason must be, not that it is less likely than the other to be made truly, but that it is more likely than the other to be made falsely.
is required as a justification for drawing the inference in even a single case. This uniformity, therefore, may be ascertained once for all; and if, being ascertained, it can be remembered, it will serve as a formula for making, in particular cases, all such inferences as the previous experience will warrant. But we can only secure its being remembered, or give ourselves even a chance of carrying in our memory any considerable number of such uniformities, by registering them through the medium of permanent signs; which (being, from the nature of the case, signs not of an individual fact, but of an uniformity, that is, of an indefinite number of facts similar to one another) are general signs; universals; general names, and general propositions.
ne scilicet homines putent se per opera ignis, aliquid simile iis quæ in Natura fiunt, educere et formare posse:" and again, "Compositionem tantum opus Hominis, Mistionem vero opus solius Naturæ esse: ne scilicet homines sperent aliquam ex arte Corporum naturalium generationem aut transformationem."
the phenomenon itself, that is no reason against attempting to discover the conditions. The interdict against endeavouring to reduce distinctions of colour to any common principle, would have held equally good against a like attempt on the subject of distinctions of sound; which nevertheless have been found to be immediately preceded and caused by distinguishable varieties in the vibrations of elastic bodies: though a sound, no doubt, is quite as different as a colour is from any motion of particles, vibratory or otherwise. We might add, that, in the case of colours, there are strong positive indications that they are not ultimate properties of the different kinds of substances, but depend on conditions capable of being superinduced upon all substances; since there is no substance which cannot, according to the kind of light thrown upon it, be made to assume almost any colour; and since almost every change in the mode of aggregation of the particles of the same substance, is attended with alterations in its colour, and in its optical properties generally.
common inconvenience by severing the connexion. How strong this feeling was in those ancient commonwealths which attained any durable greatness, every one knows. How happily Rome, in spite of all her tyranny, succeeded in establishing the feeling of a common country among the provinces of her vast and divided empire, will appear when any one who has given due attention to the subject shall take the trouble to point it out. In modern times the countries which have had that feeling in the strongest degree have been the most powerful countries; England, France, and, in proportion to their territory and resources, Holland and Switzerland; while England in her connexion with Ireland, is one of the most signal examples of the consequences of its absence. Every Italian knows why Italy is under a foreign yoke; every German knows what maintains despotism in the Austrian empire; the evils of Spain flow as much from the absence of nationality among the Spaniards themselves, as from the presence of it in their relations with foreigners: while the completest illustration of all is afforded by the republics of South America, where the parts of one and the same state adhere so slightly together, that no sooner does any province think itself aggrieved by the general government than it proclaims itself a separate nation."
the filiation, directly from laws of human nature, without having first ascertained the immediate or derivative laws according to which social states generate one another as society advances; the axiomata media of General Sociology.
unknown common property, conveys scarcely to any two minds the same idea. No two persons agree in the things they predicate of it; and when it is itself predicated of anything, no other person knows, nor does the speaker himself know with precision, what he means to assert. Many other words which could be named, as the word honour, or the word gentleman, exemplify this uncertainty still more strikingly.
which affirm the bare fact of existence, they have a peculiarity which renders the logical treatment of them a very easy matter; they are generalizations which are sufficiently proved by a single instance. That ghosts, or unicorns, or sea-serpents exist, would be fully established if it could be ascertained positively that such things had been even once seen. Whatever has once happened, is capable of happening again; the only question relates to the conditions under which it happens.
doubt, reacted potently upon the cause. Every considerable advance in material civilization has been preceded by an advance in knowledge: and when any great social change has come to pass, either in the way of gradual development or of sudden conflict, it has had for its precursor a great change in the opinions and modes of thinking of society. Polytheism, Judaism, Christianity, Protestantism, the critical philosophy of modern Europe, and its positive science—each of these has been a primary agent in making society what it was at each successive period, while society was but secondarily instrumental in making them, each of them (so far as causes can be assigned for its existence) being mainly an emanation not from the practical life of the period, but from the previous state of belief and thought. The weakness of the speculative propensity in mankind generally, has not, therefore, prevented the progress of speculation from governing that of society at large; it has only, and too often, prevented progress altogether, where the intellectual progression has come to an early stand for want of sufficiently favourable circumstances.
the phenomena themselves. This mistake has been pointed out in an earlier part of our inquiry,
the sun, is an uniformity derived from the laws of the causes (or forces) which produce the planetary motions; but that the square of any number is four times the square of half the number, is true independently of any cause. The only laws of resemblance, therefore, which we are called upon to consider independently of causation, belong to the province of mathematics.
the results of the original unscientific Induction; and on this diversity (as observed in the fourth chapter of the present book) depend the rules for the improvement of the process. The improvement consists in correcting one of these inartificial generalizations by means of another. As has been already pointed out, this is all that art can do. To test a generalization, by showing that it either follows from, or conflicts with, some stronger induction, some generalization resting on a broader foundation of experience, is the beginning and end of the logic of Induction.
in short, on the evidence of the senses. That things equal to the same thing are equal to one another, and that two straight lines which have once intersected one another continue to diverge, are inductive truths; resting, indeed, like the law of universal causation, only on induction per enumerationem simplicem; on the fact that they have been perpetually perceived to be true, and never once found to be false. But, as we have seen in a recent chapter that this evidence, in the case of a law so completely universal as the law of causation, amounts to the fullest proof, so is this even more evidently true of the general propositions to which we are now adverting; because, as a perception of their truth in any individual case whatever, requires only the simple act of looking at the objects in a proper position, there never could have been in their case (what, for a long period, there were in the case of the law of causation) instances which were apparently, though not really, exceptions to them. Their infallible truth was recognised from the very dawn of speculation; and as their extreme familiarity made it impossible for the mind to conceive the objects under any other law, they were, and still are, generally considered as truths recognised by their own evidence, or by instinct.
be possible, and though in all cases more or less precarious, and in some extremely so, would suffice to constitute a certain measure of probability: but what the amount of this probability might be, we are dispensed from estimating, since it never could amount to the degree of assurance which the proposition acquires, when, by the application to it of the Four Methods, the supposition of its falsity is shown to be inconsistent with the Law of Causation. We are therefore logically entitled, and, by the necessities of scientific Induction, required, to disregard the probabilities derived from the early rude method of generalizing, and to consider no minor generalization as proved except so far as the law of causation confirms it, nor probable except so far as it may reasonably be expected to be so confirmed.
of induction: no other exposition can be given of that logical operation. That he is wrong in the latter assertion, the whole of the preceding book has, I hope, sufficiently proved; and that the process by which the ellipticity of the planetary orbits was ascertained, is not induction at all, was attempted to be shown in the second chapter of the same book.
by independent evidence. The hypothesis, by suggesting observations and experiments, puts us on the road to that independent evidence if it be really attainable; and till it be attained, the hypothesis ought not to count for more than a conjecture.
In some cases, arbitrary numerical relations are introduced into the definition: thus, a leaf is called bilobate, when it is divided into two parts by a notch; but if the notch go to the middle of its length, it is bifid; if it go near the base of the leaf, it is bipartite; if to the base, it is bisect. Thus, too, a pod of a cruciferous plant is a siliqua, if it is four times as long as it is broad, but if it be shorter than this it is a silicula. Such terms being established, the form of the very complex leaf or frond of a fern (Hymenophyllum Wilsoni) is exactly conveyed by the following phrase:—'fronds rigid pinnate, pinnæ recurved subunilateral, pinnatifid, the segments linear undivided or bifid spinuloso-serrate.'
parts: whether the ratiocinative or the experimental portion of it be in fault, or the fault lie in dispensing with ratiocination and induction altogether.
For every individual is surrounded by circumstances different from those of every other individual; every nation or generation of mankind from every other nation or generation: and none of these differences are without their influence in forming a different type of character. There is, indeed, also a certain general resemblance; but peculiarities of circumstances are continually constituting exceptions even to the propositions which are true in the great majority of cases.
common cause, and therefore independent of collocations. The uniformities, on the other hand, in the order of superposition of strata on the earth, are empirical laws of a much weaker kind, since they not only are not laws of causation, but there is no reason to believe that they depend on any common cause: all appearances are in favour of their depending on the particular collocation of natural agents which at some time or other existed on our globe, and from which no inference can be drawn as to the collocation which exists or has existed in any other portion of the universe.
Mill) the idea of the class is that of a miscellaneous assemblage of individuals belonging to the class; or whether, finally, (what appears to be the truest opinion,) it be any one or any other of all these, according to the accidental circumstances of the case; certain it is, that some idea or mental conception is suggested by a general name, whenever we either hear it or employ it with consciousness of a meaning. And this, which we may call if we please a general idea, represents in our minds the whole class of things to which the name is applied. Whenever we think or reason concerning the class, we do so by means of this idea. And the voluntary power which the mind has, of attending to one part of what is present to it at any moment, and neglecting another part, enables us to keep our reasonings and conclusions respecting the class unaffected by anything in the idea or mental image which is not really, or at least which we do not really believe to be, common to the whole class.
learned it) by adding a single unit at a time: 5 + 1 = 6, therefore 5 + 1 + 1 = 6 + 1 = 7: and again 2 = 1 + 1, therefore 5 + 2 = 5 + 1 + 1 = 7.
their inventors, until aptly-selected words or phrases have, as it were, nailed them down and held them fast.
his senses, is almost always such as exactly confirms the opinions with which he set out. He has had eyes and ears for such things only as he expected to see. Men read the sacred books of their religion, and pass unobserved therein, multitudes of things utterly irreconcileable with even their own notions of moral excellence. With the same authorities before them, different historians, alike innocent of intentional misrepresentation, see only what is favourable to Protestants or Catholics, royalists or republicans, Charles I. or Cromwell; while others, having set out with the preconception that extremes must be in the wrong, are incapable of seeing truth and justice when these are wholly on one side.
change in one of these, or in the other, or in both. We might, then, even in the absence of any other evidence, form a reasonable presumption, from the invariable presence of both these elements in the antecedent, that the sequence is probably not an ultimate law, but a result of the laws of the two different agents; a presumption only to be destroyed when we had made ourselves so well acquainted with the laws of both, as to be able to affirm that those laws could not by themselves produce the observed result.
and that of chemistry, which we owe to the illustrious group of chemists who flourished in France towards the close of the eighteenth century. In these two departments, not only has every known species, or lowest Kind, a name assigned to it, but when new lowest Kinds are discovered, names are at once given to them on an uniform principle. In other sciences the nomenclature is not at present constructed on any system, either because the species to be named are not numerous enough to require one, (as in geometry for example,) or because no one has yet suggested a suitable principle for such a system, as in mineralogy; in which the want of a scientifically constructed nomenclature is now the principal cause which retards the progress of the science.
Positive
circumstances, and arrived at the more general conception which Europeans associate with the term.
quite justified in designating as one of the principal obstacles to good induction, general conceptions wrongly formed, "notiones temerè à rebus abstractæ:" to which Dr. Whewell adds, that not only does bad abstraction make bad induction, but that in order to perform induction well, we must have abstracted well; our general conceptions must be "clear" and "appropriate" to the matter in hand.
may be changed, and another substituted as being better suited for the purpose of distinction, while the word, still continuing to denote the same group of things, is not considered to have changed its meaning. For this is no more than may happen in the case of any other general name: we may, in reforming its connotation, leave its denotation untouched; and it is generally desirable to do so. The connotation, however, is not the less for this the real meaning, for we at once apply the name wherever the characters set down in the definition are found; and that which exclusively guides us in applying the term, must constitute its signification. If we find, contrary to our previous belief, that the characters are not peculiar to one species, we cease to use the term coextensively with the characters; but then it is because the other portion of the connotation fails; the condition that the class must be a Kind. The connotation, therefore, is still the meaning; the set of descriptive characters is a true definition; and the meaning is unfolded, not indeed (as in other cases) by the definition alone, but by the definition and the form of the word taken together.
existence of the various objects therein designated, together with some one property of each. In some cases more than one property is commonly assumed, but in no case is more than one necessary. It is assumed that there are such things in nature as straight lines, and that any two of them setting out from the same point, diverge more and more without limit. This assumption, (which includes and goes beyond Euclid's axiom that two straight lines cannot inclose a space,) is as indispensable in geometry, and as evident, resting on as simple, familiar, and universal observation, as any of the other axioms. It is also assumed that straight lines diverge from one another in different degrees; in other words, that there are such things as angles, and that they are capable of being equal or unequal. It is assumed that there is such a thing as a circle, and that all its radii are equal; such things as ellipses, and that the sums of the focal distances are equal for every point in an ellipse; such things as parallel lines, and that those lines are everywhere equally distant.
and angles which bound them. Secondly, the length of any line, whether straight or curve, is measured (certain other things being given) by the angle which it subtends, and vice versâ. Lastly, the angle which any two straight lines make with each other at an inaccessible point, is measured by the angles they severally make with any third line we choose to select. By means of these general laws, the measurement of all lines, angles, and spaces whatsoever might be accomplished by measuring a single straight line and a sufficient number of angles; which is the plan actually pursued in the trigonometrical survey of a country; and fortunate it is that this is practicable, the exact measurement of long straight lines being always difficult, and often impossible, but that of angles very easy. Three such generalizations as the foregoing afford such facilities for the indirect measurement of magnitudes, (by supplying us with known lines or angles which are marks of the magnitude of unknown ones, and thereby of the spaces which they inclose,) that it is easily intelligible how from a few data we can go on to ascertain the magnitude of an indefinite multitude of lines, angles, and spaces, which we could not easily, or could not at all, measure by any more direct process.
on the first, the observed uniformity of coexistence can only hold good as an empirical law, within the limits not only of actual observation, but of an observation as accurate as the nature of the case required. And hence it is that (as remarked in an early chapter of the present Book) we so often give up generalizations of this class at the first summons. If any credible witness stated that he had seen a white crow, under circumstances which made it not incredible that it should have escaped notice previously, we should give full credence to the statement.
observations renders it impossible to predict to what extent unknown counteracting causes may be distributed throughout nature. But when a generalization has been found to hold good of a very large proportion of all things whatever, it is already proved that nearly all the causes which exist in nature have no power over it; that very few changes in the combination of causes can effect it; since the greater number of possible combinations must have already existed in some one or other of the instances in which it has been found true. If, therefore, any empirical law is a result of causation, the more general it is, the more it may be depended on. And even if it be no result of causation, but an ultimate coexistence, the more general it is, the greater amount of experience it is derived from, and the greater therefore is the probability that if exceptions had existed, some would already have presented themselves.
an adviser for practice. His part is only to show that certain consequences follow from certain causes, and that to obtain certain ends, certain means are the most effectual. Whether the ends themselves are such as ought to be pursued, and if so, in what cases and to how great a length, it is no part of his business as a cultivator of science to decide, and science alone will never qualify him for the decision. In purely physical science, there is not much temptation to assume this ulterior office; but those who treat of human nature and society invariably claim it; they always undertake to say, not merely what is, but what ought to be. To entitle them to do this, a complete doctrine of Teleology is indispensable. A scientific theory, however perfect, of the subject matter, considered merely as part of the order of nature, can in no degree serve as a substitute. In this respect the various subordinate arts afford a misleading analogy. In them there is seldom any visible necessity for justifying the end, since in general its desirableness is denied by nobody, and it is only when the question of precedence is to be decided between that end and some other, that the general principles of Teleology have to be called in: but a writer on Morals and Politics requires those principles at every step. The most elaborate and well-digested exposition of the laws of succession and coexistence among mental or social phenomena, and of their relation to one another as causes and effects, will be of no avail towards the art of Life or of Society, if the ends to be aimed at by that art are left to the vague suggestions of the intellectus sibi permissus, or are taken for granted without analysis or questioning.
BOOK III.
CONTINUED.
OF INDUCTION.
"In such cases the inductive and deductive methods of inquiry may be said to go hand in hand, the one verifying the conclusions deduced by the other; and the combination of experiment and theory, which may thus be brought to bear in such cases, forms an engine of discovery infinitely more powerful than either taken separately. This state of any department of science is perhaps of all others the most interesting, and that which promises the most to research."—Sir J. Herschel, Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy.
CHAPTER XIV.
OF THE LIMITS TO THE EXPLANATION OF LAWS OF NATURE; AND OF HYPOTHESES.
§ 1. The preceding considerations have led us to recognise a distinction between two kinds of laws, or observed uniformities in nature: ultimate laws, and what may be termed derivative laws. Derivative laws are such as are deducible from, and may, in any of the modes which we have pointed out, be resolved into, other and more general ones. Ultimate laws are those which cannot. We are not sure that any of the uniformities with which we are yet acquainted are ultimate laws; but we know that there must be ultimate laws; and that every resolution of a derivative law into more general laws, brings us nearer to them.
Since we are continually discovering that uniformities, not previously known to be other than ultimate, are derivative, and resolvable into more general laws; since (in other words) we are continually discovering the explanation of some sequence which was previously known only as a fact; it becomes an interesting question whether there are any necessary limits to this philosophical operation, or whether it may proceed until all the uniform sequences in nature are resolved into some one universal law. For this seems, at first sight, to be the ultimatum towards which the progress of induction, by the Deductive Method resting on a basis of observation and experiment, is tending. Projects of this kind were universal in the infancy of philosophy; any speculations which held out a less brilliant prospect, being in those early times deemed not worth pursuing. And the idea receives so much apparent countenance from the nature of the most remarkable achievements of modern science, that speculators are even now frequently appearing, who profess either to have solved the problem, or to suggest modes in which it may one day be solved. Even where pretensions of this magnitude are not made, the character of the solutions which are given or sought of particular classes of phenomena, often involves such conceptions of what constitutes explanation, as would render the notion of explaining all phenomena whatever by means of some one cause or law, perfectly admissible.
§ 2. It is therefore useful to remark, that the ultimate Laws of Nature cannot possibly be less numerous than the distinguishable sensations or other feelings of our nature;—those, I mean, which are distinguishable from one another in quality, and not merely in quantity or degree. For example; since there is a phenomenon sui generis, called colour, which our consciousness testifies to be not a particular degree of some other phenomenon, as heat or odour or motion, but intrinsically unlike all others, it follows that there are ultimate laws of colour; that though the facts of colour may admit of explanation, they never can be explained from laws of heat or odour alone, or of motion alone, but that however far the explanation may be carried, there will always remain in it a law of colour. I do not mean that it might not possibly be shown that some other phenomenon, some chemical or mechanical action for example, invariably precedes, and is the cause of, every phenomenon of colour. But though this, if proved, would be an important extension of our knowledge of nature, it would not explain how or why a motion, or a chemical action, can produce a sensation of colour; and however diligent might be our scrutiny of the phenomena, whatever number of hidden links we might detect in the chain of causation terminating in the colour, the last link would still be a law of colour, not a law of motion, nor of any other phenomenon whatever. Nor does this observation apply only to colour, as compared with any other of the great classes of sensations; it applies to every particular colour, as compared with others. White colour can in no manner be explained exclusively by the laws of the production of red colour. In any attempt to explain it, we cannot but introduce, as one element of the explanation, the proposition that some antecedent or other produces the sensation of white.
The ideal limit, therefore, of the explanation of natural phenomena (towards which as towards other ideal limits we are constantly tending, without the prospect of ever completely attaining it) would be to show that each distinguishable variety of our sensations, or other states of consciousness, has only one sort of cause; that, for example, whenever we perceive a white colour, there is some one condition or set of conditions which is always present, and the presence of which always produces in us that sensation. As long as there are several known modes of production of a phenomenon, (several different substances, for instance, which have the property of whiteness, and between which we cannot trace any other resemblance,) so long it is not impossible that one of these modes of production may be resolved into another, or that all of them may be resolved into some more general mode of production not hitherto recognised. But when the modes of production are reduced to one, we cannot, in point of simplification, go any further. This one may not, after all, be the ultimate mode; there may be other links to be discovered between the supposed cause and the effect; but we can only further resolve the known law, by introducing some other law hitherto unknown; which will not diminish the number of ultimate laws.
In what cases, accordingly, has science been most successful in explaining phenomena, by resolving their complex laws into laws of greater simplicity and generality? Hitherto chiefly in cases of the propagation of various phenomena through space: and, first and principally, the most extensive and important of all facts of that description, the fact of motion. Now this is exactly what might be expected from the principles here laid down. Not only is motion one of the most universal of all phenomena, it is also (as might be expected from that circumstance) one of those which, apparently at least, are produced in the greatest number of ways; but the phenomenon itself is always, to our sensations, the same in every respect but degree. Differences of duration, or of velocity, are evidently differences in degree only; and differences of direction in space, which alone has any semblance of being a distinction in kind, entirely disappear (so far as our sensations are concerned) by a change in our own position; indeed the very same motion appears to us, according to our position, to take place in every variety of direction, and motions in every different direction to take place in the same. And again, motion in a straight line and in a curve are no otherwise distinct than that the one is motion continuing in the same direction, the other is motion which at each instant changes its direction. There is, therefore, according to the principles I have stated, no absurdity in supposing that all motion may be produced in one and the same way; by the same kind of cause. Accordingly, the greatest achievements in physical science have consisted in resolving one observed law of the production of motion into the laws of other known modes of production, or the laws of several such modes into one more general mode; as when the fall of bodies to the earth, and the motions of the planets, were brought under the one law of the mutual attraction of all particles of matter; when the motions said to be produced by magnetism were shown to be produced by electricity; when the motions of fluids in a lateral direction, or even contrary to the direction of gravity, were shown to be produced by gravity; and the like. There is an abundance of distinct causes of motion still unresolved into one another; gravitation, heat, electricity, chemical action, nervous action, and so forth; but whether the efforts of the present generation of savans to resolve all these different modes of production into one, are ultimately successful or not, the attempt so to resolve them is perfectly legitimate. For though these various causes produce, in other respects, sensations intrinsically different, and are not, therefore, capable of being resolved into one another, yet in so far as they all produce motion, it is quite possible that the immediate antecedent of the motion may in all these different cases be the same; nor is it impossible that these various agencies themselves may, as the new doctrines assert, all of them have for their own immediate antecedent, modes of molecular motion.
We need not extend our illustration to other cases, as for instance to the propagation of light, sound, heat, electricity, &c. through space, or any of the other phenomena which have been found susceptible of explanation by the resolution of their observed laws into more general laws. Enough has been said to display the difference between the kind of explanation and resolution of laws which is chimerical, and that of which the accomplishment is the great aim of science; and to show into what sort of elements the resolution must be effected, if at all.
§ 3. As, however, there is scarcely any one of the principles of a true method of philosophizing which does not require to be guarded against errors on both sides, I must enter a caveat against another misapprehension, of a kind directly contrary to the preceding. M. Comte, among other occasions on which he has condemned, with some asperity, any attempt to explain phenomena which are "evidently primordial," (meaning, apparently, no more than that every peculiar phenomenon must have at least one peculiar and therefore inexplicable law,) has spoken of the attempt to furnish any explanation of the colour belonging to each substance, "la couleur élémentaire propre à chaque substance," as essentially illusory. "No one," says he, "in our time attempts to explain the particular specific gravity of each substance or of each structure. Why should it be otherwise as to the specific colour, the notion of which is undoubtedly no less primordial?"[1]
Now although, as he elsewhere observes, a colour must always remain a different thing from a weight or a sound, varieties of colour might nevertheless follow, or correspond to, given varieties of weight, or sound, or some other phenomenon as different as these are from colour itself. It is one question what a thing is, and another what it depends on; and though to ascertain the conditions of an elementary phenomenon is not to obtain any new insight into the nature of the phenomenon itself, that is no reason against attempting to discover the conditions. The interdict against endeavouring to reduce distinctions of colour to any common principle, would have held equally good against a like attempt on the subject of distinctions of sound; which nevertheless have been found to be immediately preceded and caused by distinguishable varieties in the vibrations of elastic bodies: though a sound, no doubt, is quite as different as a colour is from any motion of particles, vibratory or otherwise. We might add, that, in the case of colours, there are strong positive indications that they are not ultimate properties of the different kinds of substances, but depend on conditions capable of being superinduced upon all substances; since there is no substance which cannot, according to the kind of light thrown upon it, be made to assume almost any colour; and since almost every change in the mode of aggregation of the particles of the same substance, is attended with alterations in its colour, and in its optical properties generally.
The real defect in the attempts which have been made to account for colours by the vibrations of a fluid, is not that the attempt itself is unphilosophical, but that the existence of the fluid, and the fact of its vibratory motion, are not proved; but are assumed, on no other ground than the facility they are supposed to afford of explaining the phenomena. And this consideration leads to the important question of the proper use of scientific hypotheses; the connexion of which with the subject of the explanation of the phenomena of nature, and of the necessary limits to that explanation, needs not be pointed out.
§ 4. An hypothesis is any supposition which we make (either without actual evidence, or on evidence avowedly insufficient) in order to endeavour to deduce from it conclusions in accordance with facts which are known to be real; under the idea that if the conclusions to which the hypothesis leads are known truths, the hypothesis itself either must be, or at least is likely to be, true. If the hypothesis relates to the cause, or mode of production of a phenomenon, it will serve, if admitted, to explain such facts as are found capable of being deduced from it. And this explanation is the purpose of many, if not most, hypotheses. Since explaining, in the scientific sense, means resolving an uniformity which is not a law of causation, into the laws of causation from which it results, or a complex law of causation into simpler and more general ones from which it is capable of being deductively inferred; if there do not exist any known laws which fulfil this requirement, we may feign or imagine some which would fulfil it; and this is making an hypothesis.
An hypothesis being a mere supposition, there are no other limits to hypotheses than those of the human imagination; we may, if we please, imagine, by way of accounting for an effect, some cause of a kind utterly unknown, and acting according to a law altogether fictitious. But as hypotheses of this sort would not have any of the plausibility belonging to those which ally themselves by analogy with known laws of nature, and besides would not supply the want which arbitrary hypotheses are generally invented to satisfy, by enabling the imagination to represent to itself an obscure phenomenon in a familiar light; there is probably no hypothesis in the history of science in which both the agent itself and the law of its operation were fictitious. Either the phenomenon assigned as the cause is real, but the law according to which it acts, merely supposed; or the cause is fictitious, but is supposed to produce its effects according to laws similar to those of some known class of phenomena. An instance of the first kind is afforded by the different suppositions made respecting the law of the planetary central force, anterior to the discovery of the true law, that the force varies as the inverse square of the distance; which also suggested itself to Newton, in the first instance, as an hypothesis, and was verified by proving that it led deductively to Kepler's laws. Hypotheses of the second kind are such as the vortices of Descartes, which were fictitious, but were supposed to obey the known laws of rotatory motion; or the two rival hypotheses respecting the nature of light, the one ascribing the phenomena to a fluid emitted from all luminous bodies, the other (now generally received) attributing them to vibratory motions among the particles of an ether pervading all space. Of the existence of either fluid there is no evidence, save the explanation they are calculated to afford of some of the phenomena; but they are supposed to produce their effects according to known laws; the ordinary laws of continued locomotion in the one case, and in the other, those of the propagation of undulatory movements among the particles of an elastic fluid.
According to the foregoing remarks, hypotheses are invented to enable the Deductive Method to be earlier applied to phenomena. But[2] in order to discover the cause of any phenomenon by the Deductive Method, the process must consist of three parts; induction, ratiocination, and verification. Induction, (the place of which, however, may be supplied by a prior deduction,) to ascertain the laws of the causes; ratiocination, to compute from those laws, how the causes will operate in the particular combination known to exist in the case in hand; verification, by comparing this calculated effect with the actual phenomenon. No one of these three parts of the process can be dispensed with. In the deduction which proves the identity of gravity with the central force of the solar system, all the three are found. First, it is proved from the moon's motions, that the earth attracts her with a force varying as the inverse square of the distance. This (though partly dependent on prior deductions) corresponds to the first, or purely inductive, step, the ascertainment of the law of the cause. Secondly, from this law, and from the knowledge previously obtained of the moon's mean distance from the earth, and of the actual amount of her deflexion from the tangent, it is ascertained with what rapidity the earth's attraction would cause the moon to fall, if she were no further off, and no more acted upon by extraneous forces, than terrestrial bodies are: that is the second step, the ratiocination. Finally, this calculated velocity being compared with the observed velocity with which all heavy bodies fall, by mere gravity, towards the surface of the earth, (sixteen feet in the first second, forty-eight in the second, and so forth, in the ratio of the odd numbers, 1, 3, 5, &c.,) the two quantities are found to agree. The order in which the steps are here presented, was not that of their discovery; but it is their correct logical order, as portions of the proof that the same attraction of the earth which causes the moon's motion, causes also the fall of heavy bodies to the earth: a proof which is thus complete in all its parts.
Now, the Hypothetical Method suppresses the first of the three steps, the induction to ascertain the law; and contents itself with the other two operations, ratiocination and verification; the law which is reasoned from, being assumed, instead of proved.
This process may evidently be legitimate on one supposition, namely, if the nature of the case be such that the final step, the verification, shall amount to, and fulfil the conditions of, a complete induction. We want to be assured that the law we have hypothetically assumed is a true one; and its leading deductively to true results will afford this assurance, provided the case be such that a false law cannot lead to a true result; provided no law, except the very one which we have assumed, can lead deductively to the same conclusions which that leads to. And this proviso is often realized. For example, in the very complete specimen of deduction which we just cited, the original major premise of the ratiocination, the law of the attractive force, was ascertained in this mode; by this legitimate employment of the Hypothetical Method. Newton began by an assumption, that the force which at each instant deflects a planet from its rectilineal course, and makes it describe a curve round the sun, is a force tending directly towards the sun. He then proved that if this be so, the planet will describe, as we know by Kepler's first law that it does describe, equal areas in equal times; and, lastly, he proved that if the force acted in any other direction whatever, the planet would not describe equal areas in equal times. It being thus shown that no other hypothesis would accord with the facts, the assumption was proved; the hypothesis became an inductive truth. Not only did Newton ascertain by this hypothetical process the direction of the deflecting force; he proceeded in exactly the same manner to ascertain the law of variation of the quantity of that force. He assumed that the force varied inversely as the square of the distance; showed that from this assumption the remaining two of Kepler's laws might be deduced; and finally, that any other law of variation would give results inconsistent with those laws, and inconsistent, therefore, with the real motions of the planets, of which Kepler's laws were known to be a correct expression.
I have said that in this case the verification fulfils the conditions of an induction: but an induction of what sort? On examination we find that it conforms to the canon of the Method of Difference. It affords the two instances, A B C, a b c, and B C, b c. A represents central force; A B C, the planets plus a central force; B C, the planets apart from a central force. The planets with a central force give a, areas proportional to the times; the planets without a central force give b c (a set of motions) without a, or with something else instead of a. This is the Method of Difference in all its strictness. It is true, the two instances which the method requires are obtained in this case, not by experiment, but by a prior deduction. But that is of no consequence. It is immaterial what is the nature of the evidence from which we derive the assurance that A B C will produce a b c, and B C only b c; it is enough that we have that assurance. In the present case, a process of reasoning furnished Newton with the very instances, which, if the nature of the case had admitted of it, he would have sought by experiment.
It is thus perfectly possible, and indeed is a very common occurrence, that what was an hypothesis at the beginning of the inquiry, becomes a proved law of nature before its close. But in order that this should happen, we must be able, either by deduction or experiment, to obtain both the instances which the Method of Difference requires. That we are able from the hypothesis to deduce the known facts, gives only the affirmative instance, A B C, a b c. It is equally necessary that we should be able to obtain, as Newton did, the negative instance B C, b c; by showing that no antecedent, except the one assumed in the hypothesis, would in conjunction with B C produce a.
Now it appears to me that this assurance cannot be obtained, when the cause assumed in the hypothesis is an unknown cause, imagined solely to account for a. When we are only seeking to determine the precise law of a cause already ascertained, or to distinguish the particular agent which is in fact the cause, among several agents of the same kind, one or other of which it is already known to be, we may then obtain the negative instance. An inquiry, which of the bodies of the solar system causes by its attraction some particular irregularity in the orbit or periodic time of some satellite or comet, would be a case of the second description. Newton's was a case of the first. If it had not been previously known that the planets were hindered from moving in straight lines by some force tending towards the interior of their orbit, though the exact direction was doubtful; or if it had not been known that the force increased in some proportion or other as the distance diminished, and diminished as it increased; Newton's argument would not have proved his conclusion. These facts, however, being already certain, the range of admissible suppositions was limited to the various possible directions of a line, and the various possible numerical relations between the variations of the distance, and the variations of the attractive force: now among these it was easily shown that different suppositions could not lead to identical consequences.
Accordingly, Newton could not have performed his second great scientific operation, that of identifying terrestrial gravity with the central force of the solar system, by the same hypothetical method. When the law of the moon's attraction had been proved from the data of the moon itself, then on finding the same law to accord with the phenomena of terrestrial gravity, he was warranted in adopting it as the law of those phenomena likewise; but it would not have been allowable for him, without any lunar data, to assume that the moon was attracted towards the earth with a force as the inverse square of the distance, merely because that ratio would enable him to account for terrestrial gravity: for it would have been impossible for him to prove that the observed law of the fall of heavy bodies to the earth could not result from any force, save one extending to the moon, and proportional to the inverse square.
It appears, then, to be a condition of a genuinely scientific hypothesis, that it be not destined always to remain an hypothesis, but be of such a nature as to be either proved or disproved by comparison with observed facts. This condition is fulfilled when the effect is already known to depend on the very cause supposed, and the hypothesis relates only to the precise mode of dependence; the law of the variation of the effect according to the variations in the quantity or in the relations of the cause. With these may be classed the hypotheses which do not make any supposition with regard to causation, but only with regard to the law of correspondence between facts which accompany each other in their variations, though there may be no relation of cause and effect between them. Such were the different false hypotheses which Kepler made respecting the law of the refraction of light. It was known that the direction of the line of refraction varied with every variation in the direction of the line of incidence, but it was not known how; that is, what changes of the one corresponded to the different changes of the other. In this case any law, different from the true one, must have led to false results. And, lastly, we must add to these, all hypothetical modes of merely representing, or describing, phenomena; such as the hypothesis of the ancient astronomers that the heavenly bodies moved in circles; the various hypotheses of excentrics, deferents, and epicycles, which were added to that original hypothesis; the nineteen false hypotheses which Kepler made and abandoned respecting the form of the planetary orbits; and even the doctrine in which he finally rested, that those orbits are ellipses, which was but an hypothesis like the rest until verified by facts.
In all these cases, verification is proof; if the supposition accords with the phenomena there needs no other evidence of it. But in order that this may be the case, I conceive it to be necessary, when the hypothesis relates to causation, that the supposed cause should not only be a real phenomenon, something actually existing in nature, but should be already known to exercise, or at least to be capable of exercising, an influence of some sort over the effect. In any other case, it is no evidence of the truth of the hypothesis that we are able to deduce the real phenomena from it.
Is it, then, never allowable, in a scientific hypothesis, to assume a cause; but only to ascribe an assumed law to a known cause? I do not assert this. I only say, that in the latter case alone can the hypothesis be received as true merely because it explains the phenomena: in the former case it is only useful by suggesting a line of investigation which may possibly terminate in obtaining real proof. For this purpose, as is justly remarked by M. Comte, it is indispensable that the cause suggested by the hypothesis should be in its own nature susceptible of being proved by other evidence. This seems to be the philosophical import of Newton's maxim, (so often cited with approbation by subsequent writers,) that the cause assigned for any phenomenon must not only be such as if admitted would explain the phenomenon, but must also be a vera causa. What he meant by a vera causa Newton did not indeed very explicitly define; and Dr. Whewell, who dissents from the propriety of any such restriction upon the latitude of framing hypotheses, has had little difficulty in showing[3] that his conception of it was neither precise nor consistent with itself: accordingly his optical theory was a signal instance of the violation of his own rule. It is certainly not necessary that the cause assigned should be a cause already known; else how could we ever become acquainted with any new cause? But what is true in the maxim is, that the cause, though not known previously, should be capable of being known thereafter; that its existence should be capable of being detected, and its connexion with the effect ascribed to it should be susceptible of being proved, by independent evidence. The hypothesis, by suggesting observations and experiments, puts us on the road to that independent evidence if it be really attainable; and till it be attained, the hypothesis ought not to count for more than a conjecture.
§ 5. This function, however, of hypotheses, is one which must be reckoned absolutely indispensable in science. When Newton said, "Hypotheses non fingo," he did not mean that he deprived himself of the facilities of investigation afforded by assuming in the first instance what he hoped ultimately to be able to prove. Without such assumptions, science could never have attained its present state: they are necessary steps in the progress to something more certain; and nearly everything which is now theory was once hypothesis. Even in purely experimental science, some inducement is necessary for trying one experiment rather than another; and though it is abstractedly possible that all the experiments which have been tried, might have been produced by the mere desire to ascertain what would happen in certain circumstances, without any previous conjecture as to the result; yet, in point of fact, those unobvious, delicate, and often cumbrous and tedious processes of experiment, which have thrown most light upon the general constitution of nature, would hardly ever have been undertaken by the persons or at the time they were, unless it had seemed to depend on them whether some general doctrine or theory which had been suggested, but not yet proved, should be admitted or not. If this be true even of merely experimental inquiry, the conversion of experimental into deductive truths could still less have been effected without large temporary assistance from hypotheses. The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused set of appearances, is necessarily tentative: we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption. The simplest supposition which accords with the more obvious facts, is the best to begin with; because its consequences are the most easily traced. This rude hypothesis is then rudely corrected, and the operation repeated; and the comparison of the consequences deducible from the corrected hypothesis, with the observed facts, suggests still further correction, until the deductive results are at last made to tally with the phenomena. "Some fact is as yet little understood, or some law is unknown: we frame on the subject an hypothesis as accordant as possible with the whole of the data already possessed; and the science, being thus enabled to move forward freely, always ends by leading to new consequences capable of observation, which either confirm or refute, unequivocally, the first supposition." Neither induction nor deduction would enable us to understand even the simplest phenomena, "if we did not often commence by anticipating on the results; by making a provisional supposition, at first essentially conjectural, as to some of the very notions which constitute the final object of the inquiry."[4] Let any one watch the manner in which he himself unravels a complicated mass of evidence; let him observe how, for instance, he elicits the true history of any occurrence from the involved statements of one or of many witnesses: he will find that he does not take all the items of evidence into his mind at once, and attempt to weave them together: he extemporises, from a few of the particulars, a first rude theory of the mode in which the facts took place, and then looks at the other statements one by one, to try whether they can be reconciled with that provisional theory, or what alterations or additions it requires to make it square with them. In this way, which has been justly compared to the Methods of Approximation of mathematicians, we arrive, by means of hypotheses, at conclusions not hypothetical.[5]
§ 6. It is perfectly consistent with the spirit of the method, to assume in this provisional manner not only an hypothesis respecting the law of what we already know to be the cause, but an hypothesis respecting the cause itself. It is allowable, useful, and often even necessary, to begin by asking ourselves what cause may have produced the effect, in order that we may know in what direction to look out for evidence to determine whether it actually did. The vortices of Descartes would have been a perfectly legitimate hypothesis, if it had been possible, by any mode of exploration which we could entertain the hope of ever possessing, to bring the reality of the vortices, as a fact in nature, conclusively to the test of observation. The hypothesis was vicious, simply because it could not lead to any course of investigation capable of converting it from an hypothesis into a proved fact. It might chance to be disproved, either by some want of correspondence with the phenomena it purported to explain, or (as actually happened) by some extraneous fact. "The free passage of comets through the spaces in which these vortices should have been, convinced men that these vortices did not exist."[6] But the hypothesis would have been false, though no such direct evidence of its falsity had been procurable. Direct evidence of its truth there could not be.
The prevailing hypothesis of a luminiferous ether, in other respects not without analogy to that of Descartes, is not in its own nature entirely cut off from the possibility of direct evidence in its favour. It is well known that the difference between the calculated and the observed times of the periodical return of Encke's comet, has led to a conjecture that a medium capable of opposing resistance to motion is diffused through space. If this surmise should be confirmed, in the course of ages, by the gradual accumulation of a similar variance in the case of the other bodies of the solar system, the luminiferous ether would have made a considerable advance towards the character of a vera causa, since the existence would have been ascertained of a great cosmical agent, possessing some of the attributes which the hypothesis assumes; though there would still remain many difficulties, and the identification of the ether with the resisting medium would even, I imagine, give rise to new ones. At present, however, this supposition cannot be looked upon as more than a conjecture; the existence of the ether still rests on the possibility of deducing from its assumed laws a considerable number of the phenomena of light; and this evidence I cannot regard as conclusive, because we cannot have, in the case of such an hypothesis, the assurance that if the hypothesis be false it must lead to results at variance with the true facts.
Accordingly, most thinkers of any degree of sobriety allow, that an hypothesis of this kind is not to be received as probably true because it accounts for all the known phenomena; since this is a condition sometimes fulfilled tolerably well by two conflicting hypotheses; while there are probably a thousand more which are equally possible, but which, for want of anything analogous in our experience, our minds are unfitted to conceive. But it seems to be thought that an hypothesis of the sort in question is entitled to a more favourable reception, if, besides accounting for all the facts previously known, it has led to the anticipation and prediction of others which experience afterwards verified; as the undulatory theory of light led to the prediction, subsequently realized by experiment, that two luminous rays might meet each other in such a manner as to produce darkness. Such predictions and their fulfilment are, indeed, well calculated to impress the uninformed, whose faith in science rests solely on similar coincidences between its prophecies and what comes to pass. But it is strange that any considerable stress should be laid upon such a coincidence by persons of scientific attainments. If the laws of the propagation of light accord with those of the vibrations of an elastic fluid in as many respects as is necessary to make the hypothesis afford a correct expression of all or most of the phenomena known at the time, it is nothing strange that they should accord with each other in one respect more. Though twenty such coincidences should occur, they would not prove the reality of the undulatory ether; it would not follow that the phenomena of light were results of the laws of elastic fluids, but at most that they are governed by laws partially identical with these; which, we may observe, is already certain, from the fact that the hypothesis in question could be for a moment tenable.[7] Cases may be cited, even in our imperfect acquaintance with nature, where agencies that we have good reason to consider as radically distinct, produce their effects, or some of their effects, according to laws which are identical. The law, for example, of the inverse square of the distance, is the measure of the intensity not only of gravitation, but (it is believed) of illumination, and of heat diffused from a centre. Yet no one looks upon this identity as proving similarity in the mechanism by which the three kinds of phenomena are produced.
According to Dr. Whewell, the coincidence of results predicted from an hypothesis, with facts afterwards observed, amounts to a conclusive proof of the truth of the theory. "If I copy a long series of letters, of which the last half dozen are concealed, and if I guess these aright, as is found to be the case when they are afterwards uncovered, this must be because I have made out the import of the inscription. To say, that because I have copied all that I could see, it is nothing strange that I should guess those which I cannot see, would be absurd, without supposing such a ground for guessing."[8] If any one, from examining the greater part of a long inscription, can interpret the characters so that the inscription gives a rational meaning in a known language, there is a strong presumption that his interpretation is correct; but I do not think the presumption much increased by his being able to guess the few remaining letters without seeing them: for we should naturally expect (when the nature of the case excludes chance) that even an erroneous interpretation which accorded with all the visible parts of the inscription would accord also with the small remainder; as would be the case, for example, if the inscription had been designedly so contrived as to admit of a double sense. I assume that the uncovered characters afford an amount of coincidence too great to be merely casual: otherwise the illustration is not a fair one. No one supposes the agreement with the phenomena of light with the theory of undulations to be merely fortuitous. It must arise from the actual identity of some of the laws of undulations with some of those of light: and if there be that identity, it is reasonable to suppose that its consequences would not end with the phenomena which first suggested the identification, nor be even confined to such phenomena as were known at the time. But it does not follow, because some of the laws agree with those of undulations, that there are any actual undulations; no more than it followed because some (though not so many) of the same laws agreed with those of the projection of particles, that there was actual emission of particles. Even the undulatory hypothesis does not account for all the phenomena of light. The natural colours of objects, the compound nature of the solar ray, the absorption of light, and its chemical and vital action, the hypothesis leaves as mysterious as it found them; and some of these facts are, at least apparently, more reconcileable with the emission theory than with that of Young and Fresnel. Who knows but that some third hypothesis, including all these phenomena, may in time leave the undulatory theory as far behind as that has left the theory of Newton and his successors?
To the statement, that the condition of accounting for all the known phenomena is often fulfilled equally well by two conflicting hypotheses, Dr. Whewell makes answer that he knows "of no such case in the history of science, where the phenomena are at all numerous and complicated."[9] Such an affirmation, by a writer of Dr. Whewell's minute acquaintance with the history of science, would carry great authority, if he had not, a few pages before, taken pains to refute it,[10] by maintaining that even the exploded scientific hypotheses might always, or almost always, have been so modified as to make them correct representations of the phenomena. The hypothesis of vortices, he tells us, was, by successive modifications, brought to coincide in its results with the Newtonian theory and with the facts. The vortices did not indeed explain all the phenomena which the Newtonian theory was ultimately found to account for, such as the precession of the equinoxes; but this phenomenon was not, at the time, in the contemplation of either party, as one of the facts to be accounted for. All the facts which they did contemplate, we may believe on Dr. Whewell's authority to have accorded as accurately with the Cartesian hypothesis, in its finally improved state, as with Newton's.
But it is not, I conceive, a valid reason for accepting any given hypothesis, that we are unable to imagine any other which will account for the facts. There is no necessity for supposing that the true explanation must be one which, with only our present experience, we could imagine. Among the natural agents with which we are acquainted, the vibrations of an elastic fluid may be the only one whose laws bear a close resemblance to those of light; but we cannot tell that there does not exist an unknown cause, other than an elastic ether diffused through space, yet producing effects identical in some respects with those which would result from the undulations of such an ether. To assume that no such cause can exist, appears to me an extreme case of assumption without evidence.
I do not mean to condemn those who employ themselves in working out into detail this sort of hypotheses; it is useful to ascertain what are the known phenomena, to the laws of which those of the subject of inquiry bear the greatest, or even a great analogy, since this may suggest (as in the case of the luminiferous ether it actually did) experiments to determine whether the analogy which goes so far does not extend still further. But that, in doing this, we should imagine ourselves to be seriously inquiring whether the hypothesis of an ether, an electric fluid, or the like, is true; that we should fancy it possible to obtain the assurance that the phenomena are produced in that way and no other; seems to me, I confess, unworthy of the present improved conceptions of the methods of physical science. And at the risk of being charged with want of modesty, I cannot help expressing astonishment that a philosopher of Dr. Whewell's abilities and attainments should have written an elaborate treatise on the philosophy of induction, in which he recognises absolutely no mode of induction except that of trying hypothesis after hypothesis until one is found which fits the phenomena; which one, when found, is to be assumed as true, with no other reservation than that if on re-examination it should appear to assume more than is needful for explaining the phenomena, the superfluous part of the assumption should be cut off. And this without the slightest distinction between the cases in which it may be known beforehand that two different hypotheses cannot lead to the same result, and those in which, for aught we can ever know, the range of suppositions, all equally consistent with the phenomena, may be infinite.[11]
§ 7. It is necessary, before quitting the subject of hypotheses, to guard against the appearance of reflecting upon the scientific value of several branches of physical inquiry, which, though only in their infancy, I hold to be strictly inductive. There is a great difference between inventing agencies to account for classes of phenomena, and endeavouring, in conformity with known laws, to conjecture what former collocations of known agents may have given birth to individual facts still in existence. The latter is the legitimate operation of inferring from an observed effect, the existence, in time past, of a cause similar to that by which we know it to be produced in all cases in which we have actual experience of its origin. This, for example, is the scope of the inquiries of geology; and they are no more illogical or visionary than judicial inquiries, which also aim at discovering a past event by inference from those of its effects which still subsist. As we can ascertain whether a man was murdered or died a natural death, from the indications exhibited by the corpse, the presence or absence of signs of struggling on the ground or on the adjacent objects, the marks of blood, the footsteps of the supposed murderers, and so on, proceeding throughout on uniformities ascertained by a perfect induction without any mixture of hypothesis; so if we find, on and beneath the surface of our planet, masses exactly similar to deposits from water, or to results of the cooling of matter melted by fire, we may justly conclude that such has been their origin; and if the effects, though similar in kind, are on a far larger scale than any which are now produced, we may rationally, and without hypothesis, conclude either that the causes existed formerly with greater intensity, or that they have operated during an enormous length of time. Further than this no geologist of authority has, since the rise of the present enlightened school of geological speculation, attempted to go.
In many geological inquiries it doubtless happens that though the laws to which the phenomena are ascribed are known laws, and the agents known agents, those agents are not known to have been present in the particular case. In the speculation respecting the igneous origin of trap or granite, the fact does not admit of direct proof, that those substances have been actually subjected to intense heat. But the same thing might be said of all judicial inquiries which proceed on circumstantial evidence. We can conclude that a man was murdered, though it is not proved by the testimony of eye-witnesses that some person who had the intention of murdering him was present on the spot. It is enough, for most purposes, if no other known cause could have generated the effects shown to have been produced.
The celebrated speculation of Laplace concerning the origin of the earth and planets, participates essentially in the inductive character of modern geological theory. The speculation is, that the atmosphere of the sun originally extended to the present limits of the solar system; from which, by the process of cooling, it has contracted to its present dimensions; and since, by the general principles of mechanics, the rotation of the sun and of its accompanying atmosphere must increase in rapidity as its volume diminishes, the increased centrifugal force generated by the more rapid rotation, overbalancing the action of gravitation, has caused the sun to abandon successive rings of vaporous matter, which are supposed to have condensed by cooling, and to have become the planets. There is in this theory no unknown substance introduced on supposition, nor any unknown property or law ascribed to a known substance. The known laws of matter authorize us to suppose that a body which is constantly giving out so large an amount of heat as the sun is, must be progressively cooling, and that, by the process of cooling, it must contract; if, therefore, we endeavour, from the present state of that luminary, to infer its state in a time long past, we must necessarily suppose that its atmosphere extended much farther than at present, and we are entitled to suppose that it extended as far as we can trace effects such as it might naturally leave behind it on retiring; and such the planets are. These suppositions being made, it follows from known laws that successive zones of the solar atmosphere might be abandoned; that these would continue to revolve round the sun with the same velocity as when they formed part of its substance; and that they would cool down, long before the sun itself, to any given temperature, and consequently to that at which the greater part of the vaporous matter of which they consisted would become liquid or solid. The known law of gravitation would then cause them to agglomerate in masses, which would assume the shape our planets actually exhibit; would acquire, each about its own axis, a rotatory movement; and would in that state revolve, as the planets actually do, about the sun, in the same direction with the sun's rotation, but with less velocity, because in the same periodic time which the sun's rotation occupied when his atmosphere extended to that point. There is thus, in Laplace's theory, nothing, strictly speaking, hypothetical: it is an example of legitimate reasoning from a present effect to a possible past cause, according to the known laws of that cause. The theory therefore is, as I have said, of a similar character to the theories of geologists; but considerably inferior to them in point of evidence. Even if it were proved (which it is not) that the conditions necessary for determining the breaking off of successive rings would certainly occur; there would still be a much greater chance of error in assuming that the existing laws of nature are the same which existed at the origin of the solar system, than in merely presuming (with geologists) that those laws have lasted through a few revolutions and transformations of a single one among the bodies of which that system is composed.
CHAPTER XV.
OF PROGRESSIVE EFFECTS; AND OF THE CONTINUED ACTION OF CAUSES.
§ 1. In the last four chapters we have traced the general outlines of the theory of the generation of derivative laws from ultimate ones. In the present chapter our attention will be directed to a particular case of the derivation of laws from other laws, but a case so general, and so important, as not only to repay, but to require, a separate examination. This is, the case of a complex phenomenon resulting from one simple law, by the continual addition of an effect to itself.
There are some phenomena, some bodily sensations for example, which are essentially instantaneous, and whose existence can only be prolonged by the prolongation of the existence of the cause by which they are produced. But most phenomena are in their own nature permanent; having begun to exist, they would exist for ever unless some cause intervened having a tendency to alter or destroy them. Such, for example, are all the facts or phenomena which we call bodies. Water, once produced, will not of itself relapse into a state of hydrogen and oxygen; such a change requires some agent having the power of decomposing the compound. Such, again, are the positions in space, and the movements, of bodies. No object at rest alters its position without the intervention of some conditions extraneous to itself; and when once in motion, no object returns to a state of rest, or alters either its direction or its velocity, unless some new external conditions are superinduced. It, therefore, perpetually happens that a temporary cause gives rise to a permanent effect. The contact of iron with moist air for a few hours, produces a rust which may endure for centuries; or a projectile force which launches a cannon ball into space, produces a motion which would continue for ever unless some other force counteracted it.
Between the two examples which we have here given, there is a difference worth pointing out. In the former (in which the phenomenon produced is a substance, and not a motion of a substance), since the rust remains for ever and unaltered unless some new cause supervenes, we may speak of the contact of air a hundred years ago as even the proximate cause of the rust which has existed from that time until now. But when the effect is motion, which is itself a change, we must use a different language. The permanency of the effect is now only the permanency of a series of changes. The second foot, or inch, or mile of motion, is not the mere prolonged duration of the first foot, or inch, or mile, but another fact which succeeds, and which may in some respects be very unlike the former, since it carries the body through a different region of space. Now, the original projectile force which set the body moving is the remote cause of all its motion, however long continued, but the proximate cause of no motion except that which took place at the first instant. The motion at any subsequent instant is proximately caused by the motion which took place at the instant preceding. It is on that, and not on the original moving cause, that the motion at any given moment depends. For, suppose that the body passes through some resisting medium, which partially counteracts the effect of the original impulse, and retards the motion: this counteraction (it needs scarcely here be repeated) is as strict an example of obedience to the law of the impulse, as if the body had gone on moving with its original velocity; but the motion which results is different, being now a compound of the effects of two causes acting in contrary directions, instead of the single effect of one cause. Now, what cause does the body obey in its subsequent motion? The original cause of motion, or the actual motion at the preceding instant? The latter: for when the object issues from the resisting medium, it continues moving, not with its original, but with its retarded velocity. The motion having once been diminished, all that which follows is diminished. The effect changes, because the cause which it really obeys, the proximate cause, the real cause in fact, has changed. This principle is recognised by mathematicians when they enumerate among the causes by which the motion of a body is at any instant determined, the force generated by the previous motion; an expression which would be absurd if taken to imply that this "force" was an intermediate link between the cause and the effect, but which really means only the previous motion itself, considered as a cause of further motion. We must, therefore, if we would speak with perfect precision, consider each link in the succession of motions as the effect of the link preceding it. But if, for the convenience of discourse, we speak of the whole series as one effect, it must be as an effect produced by the original impelling force; a permanent effect produced by an instantaneous cause, and possessing the property of self-perpetuation.
Let us now suppose that the original agent or cause, instead of being instantaneous, is permanent. Whatever effect has been produced up to a given time, would (unless prevented by the intervention of some new cause) subsist permanently, even if the cause were to perish. Since, however, the cause does not perish, but continues to exist and to operate, it must go on producing more and more of the effect; and instead of an uniform effect, we have a progressive series of effects, arising from the accumulated influence of a permanent cause. Thus, the contact of iron with the atmosphere causes a portion of it to rust; and if the cause ceased, the effect already produced would be permanent, but no further effect would be added. If, however, the cause, namely, exposure to moist air, continues, more and more of the iron becomes rusted, until all which is exposed is converted into a red powder, when one of the conditions of the production of rust, namely, the presence of unoxidized iron, has ceased, and the effect cannot any longer be produced. Again, the earth causes bodies to fall towards it, that is, the existence of the earth at a given instant, causes an unsupported body to move towards it at the succeeding instant: and if the earth were annihilated, as much of the effect as is already produced would continue; the object would go on moving in the same direction, with its acquired velocity, until intercepted by some body or deflected by some other force. The earth, however, not being annihilated, goes on producing in the second instant an effect similar and of equal amount with the first, which two effects being added together, there results an accelerated velocity; and this operation being repeated at each successive instant, the mere permanence of the cause, though without increase, gives rise to a constant progressive increase of the effect, so long as all the conditions, negative and positive, of the production of that effect, continue to be realized.
It is obvious that this state of things is merely a case of the Composition of Causes. A cause which continues in action, must on a strict analysis be considered as a number of causes exactly similar, successively introduced, and producing by their combination the sum of the effects which they would severally produce if they acted singly. The progressive rusting of the iron is in strictness the sum of the effects of many particles of air acting in succession upon corresponding particles of iron. The continued action of the earth upon a falling body is equivalent to a series of forces, applied in successive instants, each tending to produce a certain constant quantity of motion; and the motion at each instant is the sum of the effects of the new force applied at the preceding instant, and the motion already acquired. In each instant, a fresh effect, of which gravity is the proximate cause, is added to the effect of which it was the remote cause: or (to express the same thing in another manner) the effect produced by the earth's influence at the instant last elapsed, is added to the sum of the effects of which the remote causes were the influences exerted by the earth at all the previous instants since the motion began. The case, therefore, comes under the principle of a concurrence of causes producing an effect equal to the sum of their separate effects. But as the causes come into play not all at once, but successively, and as the effect at each instant is the sum of the effects of those causes only which have come into action up to that instant, the result assumes the form of an ascending series; a succession of sums, each greater than that which preceded it; and we have thus a progressive effect from the continued action of a cause.
Since the continuance of the cause influences the effect only by adding to its quantity, and since the addition takes place according to a fixed law (equal quantities in equal times), the result is capable of being computed on mathematical principles. In fact, this case, being that of infinitesimal increments, is precisely the case which the differential calculus was invented to meet. The questions, what effect will result from the continual addition of a given cause to itself, and what amount of the cause, being continually added to itself, will produce a given amount of the effect, are evidently mathematical questions, and to be treated, therefore, deductively. If, as we have seen, cases of the Composition of Causes are seldom adapted for any other than deductive investigation, this is especially true in the case now examined, the continual composition of a cause with its own previous effects; since such a case is peculiarly amenable to the deductive method, while the undistinguishable manner in which the effects are blended with one another and with the causes, must make the treatment of such an instance experimentally, still more chimerical than in any other case.
§ 2. We shall next advert to a rather more intricate operation of the same principle, namely, when the cause does not merely continue in action, but undergoes, during the same time, a progressive change in those of its circumstances which contribute to determine the effect. In this case, as in the former, the total effect goes on accumulating by the continual addition of a fresh effect to that already produced, but it is no longer by the addition of equal quantities in equal times; the quantities added are unequal, and even the quality may now be different. If the change in the state of the permanent cause be progressive, the effect will go through a double series of changes, arising partly from the accumulated action of the cause, and partly from the changes in its action. The effect is still a progressive effect, produced however, not by the mere continuance of a cause, but by its continuance and its progressiveness combined.
A familiar example is afforded by the increase of the temperature as summer advances, that is, as the sun draws nearer to a vertical position, and remains a greater number of hours above the horizon. This instance exemplifies in a very interesting manner the twofold operation on the effect, arising from the continuance of the cause, and from its progressive change. When once the sun has come near enough to the zenith, and remains above the horizon long enough, to give more warmth during one diurnal rotation than the counteracting cause, the earth's radiation, can carry off, the mere continuance of the cause would progressively increase the effect, even if the sun came no nearer and the days grew no longer; but in addition to this, a change takes place in the accidents of the cause (its series of diurnal positions), tending to increase the quantity of the effect. When the summer solstice has passed, the progressive change in the cause begins to take place the reverse way; but, for some time, the accumulating effect of the mere continuance of the cause exceeds the effect of the changes in it, and the temperature continues to increase.
Again, the motion of a planet is a progressive effect, produced by causes at once permanent and progressive. The orbit of a planet is determined (omitting perturbations) by two causes: first, the action of the central body, a permanent cause, which alternately increases and diminishes as the planet draws nearer to or goes further from its perihelion, and which acts at every point in a different direction; and, secondly, the tendency of the planet to continue moving in the direction and with the velocity which it has already acquired. This force also grows greater as the planet draws nearer to its perihelion, because as it does so its velocity increases; and less, as it recedes from its perihelion: and this force as well as the other acts at each point in a different direction, because at every point the action of the central force, by deflecting the planet from its previous direction, alters the line in which it tends to continue moving. The motion at each instant is determined by the amount and direction of the motion, and the amount and direction of the sun's action, at the previous instant: and if we speak of the entire revolution of the planet as one phenomenon (which, as it is periodical and similar to itself, we often find it convenient to do,) that phenomenon is the progressive effect of two permanent and progressive causes, the central force and the acquired motion. Those causes happening to be progressive in the particular way which is called periodical, the effect necessarily is so too; because the quantities to be added together returning in a regular order, the same sums must also regularly return.
This example is worthy of consideration also in another respect. Though the causes themselves are permanent, and independent of all conditions known to us, the changes which take place in the quantities and relations of the causes are actually caused by the periodical changes in the effects. The causes, as they exist at any moment, having produced a certain motion, that motion, becoming itself a cause, reacts upon the causes, and produces a change in them. By altering the distance and direction of the central body relatively to the planet, and the direction and quantity of the force in the direction of the tangent, it alters the elements which determine the motion at the next succeeding instant. This change renders the next motion somewhat different; and this difference, by a fresh reaction upon the causes, renders the next motion again different, and so on. The original state of the causes might have been such, that this series of actions modified by reactions would not have been periodical. The sun's action, and the original impelling force, might have been in such a ratio to one another, that the reaction of the effect would have been such as to alter the causes more and more, without ever bringing them back to what they were at any former time. The planet would then have moved in a parabola, or an hyperbola, curves not returning into themselves. The quantities of the two forces were, however, originally such, that the successive reactions of the effect bring back the causes, after a certain time, to what they were before; and from that time all the variations continue to recur again and again in the same periodical order, and must so continue while the causes subsist and are not counteracted.
§ 3. In all cases of progressive effects, whether arising from the accumulation of unchanging or of changing elements, there is an uniformity of succession not merely between the cause and the effect, but between the first stages of the effect and its subsequent stages. That a body in vacuo falls sixteen feet in the first second, forty-eight in the second, and so on in the ratio of the odd numbers, is as much an uniform sequence as that when the supports are removed the body falls. The sequence of spring and summer is as regular and invariable as that of the approach of the sun and spring: but we do not consider spring to be the cause of summer; it is evident that both are successive effects of the heat received from the sun, and that, considered merely in itself, spring might continue for ever, without having the slightest tendency to produce summer. As we have so often remarked, not the conditional, but the unconditional invariable antecedent is termed the cause. That which would not be followed by the effect unless something else had preceded, is not the cause, however invariable the sequence may in fact be.
It is in this way that most of those uniformities of succession are generated, which are not cases of causation. When a phenomenon goes on increasing, or periodically increases and diminishes, or goes through any continued and unceasing process of variation reducible to an uniform rule or law of succession, we do not on this account presume that any two successive terms of the series are cause and effect. We presume the contrary; we expect to find that the whole series originates either from the continued action of fixed causes, or from causes which go through a corresponding process of continuous change. A tree grows from half an inch high to a hundred feet; and some trees will generally grow to that height, unless prevented by some counteracting cause. But we do not call the seedling the cause of the full-grown tree; the invariable antecedent it certainly is, and we know very imperfectly on what other antecedents the sequence is contingent, but we are convinced that it is contingent on something; because the homogeneousness of the antecedent with the consequent, the close resemblance of the seedling to the tree in all respects except magnitude, and the graduality of the growth, so exactly resembling the progressively accumulating effect produced by the long action of some one cause, leave no possibility of doubting that the seedling and the tree are two terms in a series of that description, the first term of which is yet to seek. The conclusion is further confirmed by this, that we are able to prove by strict induction the dependence of the growth of the tree, and even of the continuance of its existence, upon the continued repetition of certain processes of nutrition, the rise of the sap, the absorptions and exhalations by the leaves, &c.; and the same experiments would probably prove to us that the growth of the tree is the accumulated sum of the effects of these continued processes, were we not, for want of sufficiently microscopic eyes, unable to observe correctly and in detail what those effects are.
This supposition by no means requires that the effect should not, during its progress, undergo many modifications besides those of quantity, or that it should not sometimes appear to undergo a very marked change of character. This may be either because the unknown cause consists of several component elements or agents, whose effects, accumulating according to different laws, are compounded in different proportions at different periods in the existence of the organized being; or because, at certain points in its progress, fresh causes or agencies come in, or are evolved, which intermix their laws with those of the prime agent.
[2] Vide supra, book iii. ch. xi.
[1] Cours de Philosophie Positive, ii. 656.
[11] In Dr. Whewell's latest version of his theory (Philosophy of Discovery, p. 331) he makes a concession respecting the medium of the transmission of light, which, taken in conjunction with the rest of his doctrine on the subject, is not, I confess, very intelligible to me, but which goes far towards removing, if it does not actually remove, the whole of the difference between us. He is contending, against Sir William Hamilton, that all matter has weight. Sir William, in proof of the contrary, cited the luminiferous ether, and the calorific and electric fluids, "which," he said, "we can neither denude of their character of substance, nor clothe with the attribute of weight." "To which," continues Dr. Whewell, "my reply is, that precisely because I cannot clothe these agents with the attribute of Weight, I do denude them of the character of Substance. They are not substances, but agencies. These Imponderable Agents, are not properly called Imponderable Fluids. This I conceive that I have proved." Nothing can be more philosophical. But if the luminiferous ether is not matter, and fluid matter too, what is the meaning of its undulations? Can an agency undulate? Can there be alternate motion forward and backward of the particles of an agency? And does not the whole mathematical theory of the undulations imply them to be material? Is it not a series of deductions from the known properties of elastic fluids? This opinion of Dr. Whewell reduces the undulations to a figure of speech, and the undulatory theory to the proposition which all must admit, that the transmission of light takes place according to laws which present a very striking and remarkable agreement with those of undulations. If Dr. Whewell is prepared to stand by this doctrine, I have no difference with him on the subject.
[4] Philosophie Positive, ii. 434-437.
[3] Philosophy of Discovery, pp. 185 et seqq.
[10] P. 251 and the whole of Appendix G.
[7] What has most contributed to accredit the hypothesis of a physical medium for the conveyance of light, is the certain fact that light travels, (which cannot be proved of gravitation,) that its communication is not instantaneous, but requires time, and that it is intercepted (which gravitation is not) by intervening objects. These are analogies between its phenomena and those of the mechanical motion of a solid or fluid substance. But we are not entitled to assume that mechanical motion is the only power in nature capable of exhibiting those attributes.
[8] Phil. of Disc. p. 274.
[5] As an example of legitimate hypothesis according to the test here laid down, has been justly cited that of Broussais, who, proceeding on the very rational principle that every disease must originate in some definite part or other of the organism, boldly assumed that certain fevers, which not being known to be local were called constitutional, had their origin in the mucous membrane of the alimentary canal. The supposition was indeed, as is now generally admitted, erroneous; but he was justified in making it, since by deducing the consequences of the supposition, and comparing them with the facts of those maladies, he might be certain of disproving his hypothesis if it was ill founded, and might expect that the comparison would materially aid him in framing another more conformable to the phenomena.
[9] P. 271.
[6] Whewell's Phil. of Discovery, pp. 275, 276.
CHAPTER XVI.
OF EMPIRICAL LAWS.
§ 1. Scientific inquirers give the name of Empirical Laws to those uniformities which observation or experiment has shown to exist, but on which they hesitate to rely in cases varying much from those which have been actually observed, for want of seeing any reason why such a law should exist. It is implied, therefore, in the notion of an empirical law, that it is not an ultimate law; that if true at all, its truth is capable of being, and requires to be, accounted for. It is a derivative law, the derivation of which is not yet known. To state the explanation, the why, of the empirical law, would be to state the laws from which it is derived; the ultimate causes on which it is contingent. And if we knew these, we should also know what are its limits; under what conditions it would cease to be fulfilled.
The periodical return of eclipses, as originally ascertained by the persevering observation of the early eastern astronomers, was an empirical law, until the general laws of the celestial motions had accounted for it. The following are empirical laws still waiting to be resolved into the simpler laws from which they are derived. The local laws of the flux and reflux of the tides in different places: the succession of certain kinds of weather to certain appearances of sky: the apparent exceptions to the almost universal truth that bodies expand by increase of temperature: the law that breeds, both animal and vegetable, are improved by crossing: that gases have a strong tendency to permeate animal membranes: that substances containing a very high proportion of nitrogen (such as hydrocyanic acid and morphia) are powerful poisons: that when different metals are fused together, the alloy is harder than the various elements: that the number of atoms of acid required to neutralize one atom of any base, is equal to the number of atoms of oxygen in the base: that the solubility of substances in one another, depends[12] (at least in some degree) on the similarity of their elements.
An empirical law, then, is an observed uniformity, presumed to be resolvable into simpler laws, but not yet resolved into them. The ascertainment of the empirical laws of phenomena often precedes by a long interval the explanation of those laws by the Deductive Method; and the verification of a deduction usually consists in the comparison of its results with empirical laws previously ascertained.
§ 2. From a limited number of ultimate laws of causation, there are necessarily generated a vast number of derivative uniformities, both of succession and of coexistence. Some are laws of succession or of coexistence between different effects of the same cause: of these we had examples in the last chapter. Some are laws of succession between effects and their remote causes; resolvable into the laws which connect each with the intermediate link. Thirdly, when causes act together and compound their effects, the laws of those causes generate the fundamental law of the effect, namely, that it depends on the coexistence of those causes. And, finally, the order of succession or of coexistence which obtains among effects, necessarily depends on their causes. If they are effects of the same cause, it depends on the laws of that cause; if on different causes, it depends on the laws of those causes severally, and on the circumstances which determine their coexistence. If we inquire further when and how the causes will coexist, that, again, depends on their causes: and we may thus trace back the phenomena higher and higher, until the different series of effects meet in a point, and the whole is shown to have depended ultimately on some common cause; or until, instead of converging to one point, they terminate in different points, and the order of the effects is proved to have arisen from the collocation of some of the primeval causes, or natural agents. For example, the order of succession and of coexistence among the heavenly motions, which is expressed by Kepler's laws, is derived from the coexistence of two primeval causes, the sun, and the original impulse or projectile force belonging to each planet.[13] Kepler's laws are resolved into the laws of these causes and the fact of their coexistence.
Derivative laws, therefore, do not depend solely on the ultimate laws into which they are resolvable: they mostly depend on those ultimate laws, and an ultimate fact; namely, the mode of coexistence of some of the component elements of the universe. The ultimate laws of causation might be the same as at present, and yet the derivative laws completely different, if the causes coexisted in different proportions, or with any difference in those of their relations by which the effects are influenced. If, for example, the sun's attraction, and the original projectile force, had existed in some other ratio to one another than they did (and we know of no reason why this should not have been the case), the derivative laws of the heavenly motions might have been quite different from what they are. The proportions which exist happen to be such as to produce regular elliptical motions; any other proportions would have produced different ellipses, or circular, or parabolic, or hyperbolic motions, but still regular ones; because the effects of each of the agents accumulate according to an uniform law; and two regular series of quantities, when their corresponding terms are added, must produce a regular series of some sort, whatever the quantities themselves are.
§ 3. Now this last-mentioned element in the resolution of a derivative law, the element which is not a law of causation, but a collocation of causes, cannot itself be reduced to any law. There is (as formerly remarked[14]) no uniformity, no norma, principle, or rule, perceivable in the distribution of the primeval natural agents through the universe. The different substances composing the earth, the powers that pervade the universe, stand in no constant relation to one another. One substance is more abundant than others, one power acts through a larger extent of space than others, without any pervading analogy that we can discover. We not only do not know of any reason why the sun's attraction and the force in the direction of the tangent coexist in the exact proportion they do, but we can trace no coincidence between it and the proportions in which any other elementary powers in the universe are intermingled. The utmost disorder is apparent in the combination of the causes; which is consistent with the most regular order in their effects; for when each agent carries on its own operations according to an uniform law, even the most capricious combination of agencies will generate a regularity of some sort; as we see in the kaleidoscope, where any casual arrangement of coloured bits of glass produces by the laws of reflection a beautiful regularity in the effect.
§ 4. In the above considerations lies the justification of the limited degree of reliance which scientific inquirers are accustomed to place in empirical laws.
A derivative law which results wholly from the operation of some one cause, will be as universally true as the laws of the cause itself; that is, it will always be true except where some one of those effects of the cause, on which the derivative law depends, is defeated by a counteracting cause. But when the derivative law results not from different effects of one cause, but from effects of several causes, we cannot be certain that it will be true under any variation in the mode of coexistence of those causes, or of the primitive natural agents on which the causes ultimately depend. The proposition that coal beds rest on certain descriptions of strata exclusively, though true on the earth so far as our observation has reached, cannot be extended to the moon or the other planets, supposing coal to exist there; because we cannot be assured that the original constitution of any other planet was such as to produce the different depositions in the same order as in our globe. The derivative law in this case depends not solely on laws, but on a collocation; and collocations cannot be reduced to any law.
Now it is the very nature of a derivative law which has not yet been resolved into its elements, in other words, an empirical law, that we do not know whether it results from the different effects of one cause, or from effects of different causes. We cannot tell whether it depends wholly on laws, or partly on laws and partly on a collocation. If it depends on a collocation, it will be true in all the cases in which that particular collocation exists. But, since we are entirely ignorant, in case of its depending on a collocation, what the collocation is, we are not safe in extending the law beyond the limits of time and place in which we have actual experience of its truth. Since within those limits the law has always been found true, we have evidence that the collocations, whatever they are, on which it depends, do really exist within those limits. But, knowing of no rule or principle to which the collocations themselves conform, we cannot conclude that because a collocation is proved to exist within certain limits of place or time, it will exist beyond those limits. Empirical laws, therefore, can only be received as true within the limits of time and place in which they have been found true by observation: and not merely the limits of time and place, but of time, place, and circumstance: for since it is the very meaning of an empirical law that we do not know the ultimate laws of causation on which it is dependent, we cannot foresee, without actual trial, in what manner or to what extent the introduction of any new circumstance may affect it.
§ 5. But how are we to know that an uniformity, ascertained by experience, is only an empirical law? Since, by the supposition, we have not been able to resolve it into any other laws, how do we know that it is not an ultimate law of causation?
I answer, that no generalization amounts to more than an empirical law when the only proof on which it rests is that of the Method of Agreement. For it has been seen that by that method alone we never can arrive at causes. The utmost that the Method of Agreement can do is, to ascertain the whole of the circumstances common to all cases in which a phenomenon is produced: and this aggregate includes not only the cause of the phenomenon, but all phenomena with which it is connected by any derivative uniformity, whether as being collateral effects of the same cause, or effects of any other cause which, in all the instances we have been able to observe, coexisted with it. The method affords no means of determining which of these uniformities are laws of causation, and which are merely derivative laws, resulting from those laws of causation and from the collocation of the causes. None of them, therefore, can be received in any other character than that of derivative laws, the derivation of which has not been traced; in other words, empirical laws: in which light, all results obtained by the Method of Agreement (and therefore almost all truths obtained by simple observation without experiment) must be considered, until either confirmed by the Method of Difference, or explained deductively, in other words accounted for à priori.
These empirical laws may be of greater or less authority, according as there is reason to presume that they are resolvable into laws only, or into laws and collocations together. The sequences which we observe in the production and subsequent life of an animal or a vegetable, resting on the Method of Agreement only, are mere empirical laws; but though the antecedents in those sequences may not be the causes of the consequents, both the one and the other are doubtless, in the main, successive stages of a progressive effect originating in a common cause, and therefore independent of collocations. The uniformities, on the other hand, in the order of superposition of strata on the earth, are empirical laws of a much weaker kind, since they not only are not laws of causation, but there is no reason to believe that they depend on any common cause: all appearances are in favour of their depending on the particular collocation of natural agents which at some time or other existed on our globe, and from which no inference can be drawn as to the collocation which exists or has existed in any other portion of the universe.
§ 6. Our definition of an empirical law including not only those uniformities which are not known to be laws of causation, but also those which are, provided there be reason to presume that they are not ultimate laws; this is the proper place to consider by what signs we may judge that even if an observed uniformity be a law of causation, it is not an ultimate but a derivative law.
The first sign is, if between the antecedent a and the consequent b there be evidence of some intermediate link; some phenomenon of which we can surmise the existence, though from the imperfection of our senses or of our instruments we are unable to ascertain its precise nature and laws. If there be such a phenomenon (which may be denoted by the letter x), it follows that even if a be the cause of b, it is but the remote cause, and that the law, a causes b, is resolvable into at least two laws, a causes x, and x causes b. This is a very frequent case, since the operations of nature mostly take place on so minute a scale, that many of the successive steps are either imperceptible, or very indistinctly perceived.
Take, for example, the laws of the chemical composition of substances; as that hydrogen and oxygen being combined, water is produced. All we see of the process is, that the two gases being mixed in certain proportions, and heat or electricity being applied, an explosion takes place, the gases disappear, and water remains. There is no doubt about the law, or about its being a law of causation. But between the antecedent (the gases in a state of mechanical mixture, heated or electrified), and the consequent (the production of water), there must be an intermediate process which we do not see. For if we take any portion whatever of the water, and subject it to analysis, we find that it always contains hydrogen and oxygen; nay, the very same proportions of them, namely, two thirds, in volume, of hydrogen, and one third oxygen. This is true of a single drop; it is true of the minutest portion which our instruments are capable of appreciating. Since, then, the smallest perceptible portion of the water contains both those substances, portions of hydrogen and oxygen smaller than the smallest perceptible must have come together in every such minute portion of space; must have come closer together than when the gases were in a state of mechanical mixture, since (to mention no other reasons) the water occupies far less space than the gases. Now, as we cannot see this contact or close approach of the minute particles, we cannot observe with what circumstances it is attended, or according to what laws it produces its effects. The production of water, that is, of the sensible phenomena which characterize the compound, may be a very remote effect of those laws. There may be innumerable intervening links; and we are sure that there must be some. Having full proof that corpuscular action of some kind takes place previous to any of the great transformations in the sensible properties of substances, we can have no doubt that the laws of chemical action, as at present known, are not ultimate but derivative laws; however ignorant we may be, and even though we should for ever remain ignorant, of the nature of the laws of corpuscular action from which they are derived.
In like manner, all the processes of vegetative life, whether in the vegetable properly so called or in the animal body, are corpuscular processes. Nutrition is the addition of particles to one another, sometimes merely replacing other particles separated and excreted, sometimes occasioning an increase of bulk or weight, so gradual, that only after a long continuance does it become perceptible. Various organs, by means of peculiar vessels, secrete from the blood, fluids, the component particles of which must have been in the blood, but which differ from it most widely both in mechanical properties and in chemical composition. Here, then, are abundance of unknown links to be filled up; and there can be no doubt that the laws of the phenomena of vegetative or organic life are derivative laws, dependent on properties of the corpuscles, and of those elementary tissues which are comparatively simple combinations of corpuscles.
The first sign, then, from which a law of causation, though hitherto unresolved, may be inferred to be a derivative law, is any indication of the existence of an intermediate link or links between the antecedent and the consequent. The second is, when the antecedent is an extremely complex phenomenon, and its effects therefore, probably, in part at least, compounded of the effects of its different elements; since we know that the case in which the effect of the whole is not made up of the effects of its parts, is exceptional, the Composition of Causes being by far the more ordinary case.
We will illustrate this by two examples, in one of which the antecedent is the sum of many homogeneous, in the other of heterogeneous, parts. The weight of a body is made up of the weights of its minute particles: a truth which astronomers express in its most general terms, when they say that bodies, at equal distances, gravitate to one another in proportion to their quantity of matter. All true propositions, therefore, which can be made concerning gravity, are derivative laws; the ultimate law into which they are all resolvable being, that every particle of matter attracts every other. As our second example, we may take any of the sequences observed in meteorology: for instance, a diminution of the pressure of the atmosphere (indicated by a fall of the barometer) is followed by rain. The antecedent is here a complex phenomenon, made up of heterogeneous elements; the column of the atmosphere over any particular place consisting of two parts, a column of air, and a column of aqueous vapour mixed with it; and the change in the two together manifested by a fall of the barometer, and followed by rain, must be either a change in one of these, or in the other, or in both. We might, then, even in the absence of any other evidence, form a reasonable presumption, from the invariable presence of both these elements in the antecedent, that the sequence is probably not an ultimate law, but a result of the laws of the two different agents; a presumption only to be destroyed when we had made ourselves so well acquainted with the laws of both, as to be able to affirm that those laws could not by themselves produce the observed result.
There are but few known cases of succession from very complex antecedents, which have not either been actually accounted for from simpler laws, or inferred with great probability (from the ascertained existence of intermediate links of causation not yet understood) to be capable of being so accounted for. It is, therefore, highly probable that all sequences from complex antecedents are thus resolvable, and that ultimate laws are in all cases comparatively simple. If there were not the other reasons already mentioned for believing that the laws of organized nature are resolvable into simpler laws, it would be almost a sufficient reason that the antecedents in most of the sequences are so very complex.
§ 7. In the preceding discussion we have recognised two kinds of empirical laws: those known to be laws of causation, but presumed to be resolvable into simpler laws; and those not known to be laws of causation at all. Both these kinds of laws agree in the demand which they make for being explained by deduction, and agree in being the appropriate means of verifying such deduction, since they represent the experience with which the result of the deduction must be compared. They agree, further, in this, that until explained, and connected with the ultimate laws from which they result, they have not attained the highest degree of certainty of which laws are susceptible. It has been shown on a former occasion that laws of causation which are derivative, and compounded of simpler laws, are not only, as the nature of the case implies, less general, but even less certain, than the simpler laws from which they result; not in the same degree to be relied on as universally true. The inferiority of evidence, however, which attaches to this class of laws, is trifling, compared with that which is inherent in uniformities not known to be laws of causation at all. So long as these are unresolved, we cannot tell on how many collocations, as well as laws, their truth may be dependent; we can never, therefore, extend them with any confidence to cases in which we have not assured ourselves, by trial, that the necessary collocation of causes, whatever it may be, exists. It is to this class of laws alone that the property, which philosophers usually consider as characteristic of empirical laws, belongs in all its strictness; the property of being unfit to be relied on beyond the limits of time, place, and circumstance, in which the observations have been made. These are empirical laws in a more emphatic sense; and when I employ that term (except where the context manifestly indicates the reverse) I shall generally mean to designate those uniformities only, whether of succession or of coexistence, which are not known to be laws of causation.
CHAPTER XVII.
OF CHANCE AND ITS ELIMINATION.
§ 1. Considering then as empirical laws only those observed uniformities respecting which the question whether they are laws of causation must remain undecided until they can be explained deductively, or until some means are found of applying the Method of Difference to the case, it has been shown in the preceding chapter, that until an uniformity can, in one or the other of these modes, be taken out of the class of empirical laws, and brought either into that of laws of causation or of the demonstrated results of laws of causation, it cannot with any assurance be pronounced true beyond the local and other limits within which it has been found so by actual observation. It remains to consider how we are to assure ourselves of its truth even within those limits; after what quantity of experience a generalization which rests solely on the Method of Agreement, can be considered sufficiently established, even as an empirical law. In a former chapter, when treating of the Methods of Direct Induction, we expressly reserved this question,[15] and the time is now come for endeavouring to solve it.
We found that the Method of Agreement has the defect of not proving causation, and can therefore only be employed for the ascertainment of empirical laws. But we also found that besides this deficiency, it labours under a characteristic imperfection, tending to render uncertain even such conclusions as it is in itself adapted to prove. This imperfection arises from Plurality of Causes. Although two or more cases in which the phenomenon a has been met with, may have no common antecedent except A, this does not prove that there is any connexion between a and A, since a may have many causes, and may have been produced, in these different instances, not by anything which the instances had in common, but by some of those elements in them which were different. We nevertheless observed, that in proportion to the multiplication of instances pointing to A as the antecedent, the characteristic uncertainty of the method diminishes, and the existence of a law of connexion between A and a more nearly approaches to certainty. It is now to be determined, after what amount of experience this certainty may be deemed to be practically attained, and the connexion between A and a may be received as an empirical law.
This question may be otherwise stated in more familiar terms:—After how many and what sort of instances may it be concluded, that an observed coincidence between two phenomena is not the effect of chance?
It is of the utmost importance for understanding the logic of induction, that we should form a distinct conception of what is meant by chance, and how the phenomena which common language ascribes to that abstraction are really produced.
§ 2. Chance is usually spoken of in direct antithesis to law; whatever (it is supposed) cannot be ascribed to any law, is attributed to chance. It is, however, certain, that whatever happens is the result of some law; is an effect of causes, and could have been predicted from a knowledge of the existence of those causes, and from their laws. If I turn up a particular card, that is a consequence of its place in the pack. Its place in the pack was a consequence of the manner in which the cards were shuffled, or of the order in which they were played in the last game; which, again, were effects of prior causes. At every stage, if we had possessed an accurate knowledge of the causes in existence, it would have been abstractedly possible to foretell the effect.
An event occurring by chance, may be better described as a coincidence from which we have no ground to infer an uniformity: the occurrence of a phenomenon in certain circumstances, without our having reason on that account to infer that it will happen again in those circumstances. This, however, when looked closely into, implies that the enumeration of the circumstances is not complete. Whatever the fact be, since it has occurred once, we may be sure that if all the same circumstances were repeated, it would occur again; and not only if all, but there is some particular portion of those circumstances, on which the phenomenon is invariably consequent. With most of them, however, it is not connected in any permanent manner: its conjunction with those is said to be the effect of chance, to be merely casual. Facts casually conjoined are separately the effects of causes, and therefore of laws; but of different causes, and causes not connected by any law.
It is incorrect, then, to say that any phenomenon is produced by chance; but we may say that two or more phenomena are conjoined by chance, that they coexist or succeed one another only by chance: meaning that they are in no way related through causation; that they are neither cause and effect, nor effects of the same cause, nor effects of causes between which there subsists any law of coexistence, nor even effects of the same collocation of primeval causes.
If the same casual coincidence never occurred a second time, we should have an easy test for distinguishing such from the coincidences which are the results of a law. As long as the phenomena had been found together only once, so long, unless we knew some more general laws from which the coincidence might have resulted, we could not distinguish it from a casual one; but if it occurred twice, we should know that the phenomena so conjoined must be in some way connected through their causes.
There is, however, no such test. A coincidence may occur again and again, and yet be only casual. Nay, it would be inconsistent with what we know of the order of nature, to doubt that every casual coincidence will sooner or later be repeated, as long as the phenomena between which it occurred do not cease to exist, or to be reproduced. The recurrence, therefore, of the same coincidence more than once, or even its frequent recurrence, does not prove that it is an instance of any law; does not prove that it is not casual, or, in common language, the effect of chance.
And yet, when a coincidence cannot be deduced from known laws, nor proved by experiment to be itself a case of causation, the frequency of its occurrence is the only evidence from which we can infer that it is the result of a law. Not, however, its absolute frequency. The question is not whether the coincidence occurs often or seldom, in the ordinary sense of those terms; but whether it occurs more often than chance will account for; more often than might rationally be expected if the coincidence were casual. We have to decide, therefore, what degree of frequency in a coincidence, chance will account for. And to this there can be no general answer. We can only state the principle by which the answer must be determined: the answer itself will be different in every different case.
Suppose that one of the phenomena, A, exists always, and the other phenomenon, B, only occasionally: it follows that every instance of B will be an instance of its coincidence with A, and yet the coincidence will be merely casual, not the result of any connexion between them. The fixed stars have been constantly in existence since the beginning of human experience, and all phenomena that have come under human observation have, in every single instance, coexisted with them; yet this coincidence, though equally invariable with that which exists between any of those phenomena and its own cause, does not prove that the stars are its cause, nor that they are in anywise connected with it. As strong a case of coincidence, therefore, as can possibly exist, and a much stronger one in point of mere frequency than most of those which prove laws, does not here prove a law: why? because, since the stars exist always, they must coexist with every other phenomenon, whether connected with them by causation or not. The uniformity, great though it be, is no greater than would occur on the supposition that no such connexion exists.
On the other hand, suppose that we were inquiring whether there be any connexion between rain and any particular wind. Rain, we know, occasionally occurs with every wind; therefore the connexion, if it exists, cannot be an actual law; but still, rain may be connected with some particular wind through causation; that is, though they cannot be always effects of the same cause (for if so they would regularly coexist), there may be some causes common to the two, so that in so far as either is produced by those common causes, they will, from the laws of the causes, be found to coexist. How, then, shall we ascertain this? The obvious answer is, by observing whether rain occurs with one wind more frequently than with any other. That, however, is not enough; for perhaps that one wind blows more frequently than any other; so that its blowing more frequently in rainy weather is no more than would happen, although it had no connexion with the causes of rain, provided it were not connected with causes adverse to rain. In England, westerly winds blow during about twice as great a portion of the year as easterly. If, therefore, it rains only twice as often with a westerly, as with an easterly wind, we have no reason to infer that any law of nature is concerned in the coincidence. If it rains more than twice as often, we may be sure that some law is concerned; either there is some cause in nature which, in this climate, tends to produce both rain and a westerly wind, or a westerly wind has itself some tendency to produce rain. But if it rains less than twice as often, we may draw a directly opposite inference: the one, instead of being a cause, or connected with causes, of the other, must be connected with causes adverse to it, or with the absence of some cause which produces it; and though it may still rain much oftener with a westerly wind than with an easterly, so far would this be from proving any connexion between the phenomena, that the connexion proved would be between rain and an easterly wind, to which, in mere frequency of coincidence, it is less allied.
Here, then, are two examples: in one, the greatest possible frequency of coincidence, with no instance whatever to the contrary, does not prove that there is any law; in the other, a much less frequency of coincidence, even when non-coincidence is still more frequent, does prove that there is a law. In both cases the principle is the same. In both we consider the positive frequency of the phenomena themselves, and how great frequency of coincidence that must of itself bring about, without supposing any connexion between them, provided there be no repugnance; provided neither be connected with any cause tending to frustrate the other. If we find a greater frequency of coincidence than this, we conclude that there is some connexion; if a less frequency, that there is some repugnance. In the former case, we conclude that one of the phenomena can under some circumstances cause the other, or that there exists something capable of causing them both; in the latter, that one of them, or some cause which produces one of them, is capable of counteracting the production of the other. We have thus to deduct from the observed frequency of coincidence, as much as may be the effect of chance, that is, of the mere frequency of the phenomena themselves; and if anything remains, what does remain is the residual fact which proves the existence of a law.
The frequency of the phenomena can only be ascertained within definite limits of space and time; depending as it does on the quantity and distribution of the primeval natural agents, of which we can know nothing beyond the boundaries of human observation, since no law, no regularity, can be traced in it, enabling us to infer the unknown from the known. But for the present purpose this is no disadvantage, the question being confined within the same limits as the data. The coincidences occurred in certain places and times, and within those we can estimate the frequency with which such coincidences would be produced by chance. If, then, we find from observation that A exists in one case out of every two, and B in one case out of every three; then if there be neither connexion nor repugnance between them, or between any of their causes, the instances in which A and B will both exist, that is to say will coexist, will be one case in every six. For A exists in three cases out of six: and B, existing in one case out of every three without regard to the presence or absence of A, will exist in one case out of those three. There will therefore be, of the whole number of cases, two in which A exists without B; one case of B without A; two in which neither B nor A exists, and one case out of six in which they both exist. If then, in point of fact, they are found to coexist oftener than in one case out of six; and, consequently, A does not exist without B so often as twice in three times, nor B without A so often as once in every twice; there is some cause in existence which tends to produce a conjunction between A and B.
Generalizing the result, we may say, that if A occurs in a larger proportion of the cases where B is, than of the cases where B is not; then will B also occur in a larger proportion of the cases where A is, than of the cases where A is not; and there is some connexion, through causation, between A and B. If we could ascend to the causes of the two phenomena, we should find, at some stage, either proximate or remote, some cause or causes common to both; and if we could ascertain what these are, we could frame a generalization which would be true without restriction of place or time: but until we can do so, the fact of a connexion between the two phenomena remains an empirical law.
§ 3. Having considered in what manner it may be determined whether any given conjunction of phenomena is casual, or the result of some law; to complete the theory of chance, it is necessary that we should now consider those effects which are partly the result of chance and partly of law, or, in other words, in which the effects of casual conjunctions of causes are habitually blended in one result with the effects of a constant cause.
This is a case of Composition of Causes; and the peculiarity of it is, that instead of two or more causes intermixing their effects in a regular manner with those of one another, we have now one constant cause, producing an effect which is successively modified by a series of variable causes. Thus, as summer advances, the approach of the sun to a vertical position tends to produce a constant increase of temperature; but with this effect of a constant cause, there are blended the effects of many variable causes, winds, clouds, evaporation, electric agencies and the like, so that the temperature of any given day depends in part on these fleeting causes, and only in part on the constant cause. If the effect of the constant cause is always accompanied and disguised by effects of variable causes, it is impossible to ascertain the law of the constant cause in the ordinary manner, by separating it from all other causes and observing it apart. Hence arises the necessity of an additional rule of experimental inquiry.
When the action of a cause A is liable to be interfered with, not steadily by the same cause or causes, but by different causes at different times, and when these are so frequent, or so indeterminate, that we cannot possibly exclude all of them from any experiment, though we may vary them; our resource is, to endeavour to ascertain what is the effect of all the variable causes taken together. In order to do this, we make as many trials as possible, preserving A invariable. The results of these different trials will naturally be different, since the indeterminate modifying causes are different in each: if, then, we do not find these results to be progressive, but, on the contrary, to oscillate about a certain point, one experiment giving a result a little greater, another a little less, one a result tending a little more in one direction, another a little more in the contrary direction; while the average or middle point does not vary, but different sets of experiments (taken in as great a variety of circumstances as possible) yield the same mean, provided only they be sufficiently numerous; then that mean or average result, is the part, in each experiment, which is due to the cause A, and is the effect which would have been obtained if A could have acted alone: the variable remainder is the effect of chance, that is, of causes the coexistence of which with the cause A was merely casual. The test of the sufficiency of the induction in this case is, when any increase of the number of trials from which the average is struck, does not materially alter the average.
This kind of elimination, in which we do not eliminate any one assignable cause, but the multitude of floating unassignable ones, may be termed the Elimination of Chance. We afford an example of it when we repeat an experiment, in order, by taking the mean of different results, to get rid of the effects of the unavoidable errors of each individual experiment. When there is no permanent cause such as would produce a tendency to error peculiarly in one direction, we are warranted by experience in assuming that the errors on one side will, in a certain number of experiments, about balance the errors on the contrary side. We therefore repeat the experiment, until any change which is produced in the average of the whole by further repetition, falls within limits of error consistent with the degree of accuracy required by the purpose we have in view.[16]
§ 4. In the supposition hitherto made, the effect of the constant cause A has been assumed to form so great and conspicuous a part of the general result, that its existence never could be a matter of uncertainty, and the object of the eliminating process was only to ascertain how much is attributable to that cause; what is its exact law. Cases, however, occur in which the effect of a constant cause is so small, compared with that of some of the changeable causes with which it is liable to be casually conjoined, that of itself it escapes notice, and the very existence of any effect arising from a constant cause is first learnt, by the process which in general serves only for ascertaining the quantity of that effect. This case of induction may be characterized as follows. A given effect is known to be chiefly, and not known not to be wholly, determined by changeable causes. If it be wholly so produced, then if the aggregate be taken of a sufficient number of instances, the effects of these different causes will cancel one another. If, therefore, we do not find this to be the case, but, on the contrary, after such a number of trials has been made that no further increase alters the average result, we find that average to be, not zero, but some other quantity, about which, though small in comparison with the total effect, the effect nevertheless oscillates, and which is the middle point in its oscillation; we may conclude this to be the effect of some constant cause: which cause, by some of the methods already treated of, we may hope to detect. This may be called the discovery of a residual phenomenon by eliminating the effects of chance.
It is in this manner, for example, that loaded dice may be discovered. Of course no dice are so clumsily loaded that they must always throw certain numbers; otherwise the fraud would be instantly detected. The loading, a constant cause, mingles with the changeable causes which determine what cast will be thrown in each individual instance. If the dice were not loaded, and the throw were left to depend entirely on the changeable causes, these in a sufficient number of instances would balance one another, and there would be no preponderant number of throws of any one kind. If, therefore, after such a number of trials that no further increase of their number has any material effect upon the average, we find a preponderance in favour of a particular throw; we may conclude with assurance that there is some constant cause acting in favour of that throw, or in other words, that the dice are not fair; and the exact amount of the unfairness. In a similar manner, what is called the diurnal variation of the barometer, which is very small compared with the variations arising from the irregular changes in the state of the atmosphere, was discovered by comparing the average height of the barometer at different hours of the day. When this comparison was made, it was found that there was a small difference, which on the average was constant, however the absolute quantities might vary, and which difference, therefore, must be the effect of a constant cause. This cause was afterwards ascertained, deductively, to be the rarefaction of the air, occasioned by the increase of temperature as the day advances.
§ 5. After these general remarks on the nature of chance, we are prepared to consider in what manner assurance may be obtained that a conjunction between two phenomena, which has been observed a certain number of times, is not casual, but a result of causation, and to be received therefore as one of the uniformities of nature, though (until accounted for à priori) only as an empirical law.
We will suppose the strongest case, namely, that the phenomenon B has never been observed except in conjunction with A. Even then, the probability that they are connected is not measured by the total number of instances in which they have been found together, but by the excess of that number above the number due to the absolute frequency of A. If, for example, A exists always, and therefore coexists with everything, no number of instances of its coexistence with B would prove a connexion; as in our example of the fixed stars. If A be a fact of such common occurrence that it may be presumed to be present in half of all the cases that occur, and therefore in half the cases in which B occurs, it is only the proportional excess above half, that is to be reckoned as evidence towards proving a connexion between A and B.
In addition to the question, What is the number of coincidences which, on an average of a great multitude of trials, may be expected to arise from chance alone? there is also another question, namely, Of what extent of deviation from that average is the occurrence credible, from chance alone, in some number of instances smaller than that required for striking a fair average? It is not only to be considered what is the general result of the chances in the long run, but also what are the extreme limits of variation from the general result, which may occasionally be expected as the result of some smaller number of instances.
The consideration of the latter question, and any consideration of the former beyond that already given to it, belong to what mathematicians term the doctrine of chances, or, in a phrase of greater pretension, the Theory of Probabilities.
CHAPTER XVIII.
OF THE CALCULATION OF CHANCES.
§ 1. "Probability," says Laplace,[17] "has reference partly to our ignorance, partly to our knowledge. We know that among three or more events, one, and only one, must happen; but there is nothing leading us to believe that any one of them will happen rather than the others. In this state of indecision, it is impossible for us to pronounce with certainty on their occurrence. It is, however, probable that any one of these events, selected at pleasure, will not take place; because we perceive several cases, all equally possible, which exclude its occurrence, and only one which favours it.
"The theory of chances consists in reducing all events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible, that is, such that we are equally undecided as to their existence; and in determining the number of these cases which are favourable to the event of which the probability is sought. The ratio of that number to the number of all the possible cases, is the measure of the probability; which is thus a fraction, having for its numerator the number of cases favourable to the event, and for its denominator the number of all the cases which are possible."
To a calculation of chances, then, according to Laplace, two things are necessary: we must know that of several events some one will certainly happen, and no more than one; and we must not know, nor have any reason to expect, that it will be one of these events rather than another. It has been contended that these are not the only requisites, and that Laplace has overlooked, in the general theoretical statement, a necessary part of the foundation of the doctrine of chances. To be able (it has been said) to pronounce two events equally probable, it is not enough that we should know that one or the other must happen, and should have no grounds for conjecturing which. Experience must have shown that the two events are of equally frequent occurrence. Why, in tossing up a halfpenny, do we reckon it equally probable that we shall throw cross or pile? Because we know that in any great number of throws, cross and pile are thrown about equally often; and that the more throws we make, the more nearly the equality is perfect. We may know this if we please by actual experiment; or by the daily experience which life affords of events of the same general character; or deductively, from the effect of mechanical laws on a symmetrical body acted upon by forces varying indefinitely in quantity and direction. We may know it, in short, either by specific experience, or on the evidence of our general knowledge of nature. But, in one way or the other, we must know it, to justify us in calling the two events equally probable; and if we knew it not, we should proceed as much at haphazard in staking equal sums on the result, as in laying odds.
This view of the subject was taken in the first edition of the present work: but I have since become convinced, that the theory of chances, as conceived by Laplace and by mathematicians generally, has not the fundamental fallacy which I had ascribed to it.
We must remember that the probability of an event is not a quality of the event itself, but a mere name for the degree of ground which we, or some one else, have for expecting it. The probability of an event to one person is a different thing from the probability of the same event to another, or to the same person after he has acquired additional evidence. The probability to me, that an individual of whom I know nothing but his name, will die within the year, is totally altered by my being told, the next minute, that he is in the last stage of a consumption. Yet this makes no difference in the event itself, nor in any of the causes on which it depends. Every event is in itself certain, not probable: if we knew all, we should either know positively that it will happen, or positively that it will not. But its probability to us means the degree of expectation of its occurrence, which we are warranted in entertaining by our present evidence.
Bearing this in mind, I think it must be admitted, that even when we have no knowledge whatever to guide our expectations, except the knowledge that what happens must be some one of a certain number of possibilities, we may still reasonably judge, that one supposition is more probable to us than another supposition; and if we have any interest at stake, we shall best provide for it by acting conformably to that judgment.
§ 2. Suppose that we are required to take a ball from a box, of which we only know that it contains balls both black and white, and none of any other colour. We know that the ball we select will be either a black or a white ball; but we have no ground for expecting black rather than white, or white rather than black. In that case, if we are obliged to make a choice, and to stake something on one or the other supposition, it will, as a question of prudence, be perfectly indifferent which; and we shall act precisely as we should have acted if we had known beforehand that the box contained an equal number of black and white balls. But though our conduct would be the same, it would not be founded on any surmise that the balls were in fact thus equally divided; for we might, on the contrary, know, by authentic information, that the box contained ninety-nine balls of one colour, and only one of the other; still, if we are not told which colour has only one, and which has ninety-nine, the drawing of a white and of a black ball will be equally probable to us; we shall have no reason for staking anything on the one event rather than on the other; the option between the two will be a matter of indifference; in other words it will be an even chance.
But let it now be supposed that instead of two there are three colours—white, black, and red; and that we are entirely ignorant of the proportion in which they are mingled. We should then have no reason for expecting one more than another, and if obliged to bet, should venture our stake on red, white, or black, with equal indifference. But should we be indifferent whether we betted for or against some one colour, as, for instance, white? Surely not. From the very fact that black and red are each of them separately equally probable to us with white, the two together must be twice as probable. We should in this case expect not-white rather than white, and so much rather, that we would lay two to one upon it. It is true, there might for aught we knew be more white balls than black and red together; and if so, our bet would, if we knew more, be seen to be a disadvantageous one. But so also, for aught we knew, might there be more red balls than black and white, or more black balls than white and red, and in such case the effect of additional knowledge would be to prove to us that our bet was more advantageous than we had supposed it to be. There is in the existing state of our knowledge a rational probability of two to one against white; a probability fit to be made a basis of conduct. No reasonable person would lay an even wager in favour of white, against black and red; though against black alone, or red alone, he might do so without imprudence.
The common theory, therefore, of the calculation of chances, appears to be tenable. Even when we know nothing except the number of the possible and mutually excluding contingencies, and are entirely ignorant of their comparative frequency, we may have grounds, and grounds numerically appreciable, for acting on one supposition rather than on another; and this is the meaning of Probability.
§ 3. The principle, however, on which the reasoning proceeds, is sufficiently evident. It is the obvious one, that when the cases which exist are shared among several kinds, it is impossible that each of those kinds should be a majority of the whole: on the contrary, there must be a majority against each kind, except one at most; and if any kind has more than its share in proportion to the total number, the others collectively must have less. Granting this axiom, and assuming that we have no ground for selecting any one kind as more likely than the rest to surpass the average proportion, it follows that we cannot rationally presume this of any; which we should do, if we were to bet in favour of it, receiving less odds than in the ratio of the number of the other kinds. Even, therefore, in this extreme case of the calculation of probabilities, which does not rest on special experience at all, the logical ground of the process is our knowledge, such knowledge as we then have, of the laws governing the frequency of occurrence of the different cases; but in this case the knowledge is limited to that which, being universal and axiomatic, does not require reference to specific experience, or to any considerations arising out of the special nature of the problem under discussion.
Except, however, in such cases as games of chance, where the very purpose in view requires ignorance instead of knowledge, I can conceive no case in which we ought to be satisfied with such an estimate of chances as this; an estimate founded on the absolute minimum of knowledge respecting the subject. It is plain that, in the case of the coloured balls, a very slight ground of surmise that the white balls were really more numerous than either of the other colours, would suffice to vitiate the whole of the calculations made in our previous state of indifference. It would place us in that position of more advanced knowledge, in which the probabilities, to us, would be different from what they were before; and in estimating these new probabilities we should have to proceed on a totally different set of data, furnished no longer by mere counting of possible suppositions, but by specific knowledge of facts. Such data it should always be our endeavour to obtain; and in all inquiries, unless on subjects equally beyond the range of our means of knowledge and our practical uses, they may be obtained, if not good, at least better than none at all.[18]
It is obvious, too, that even when the probabilities are derived from observation and experiment, a very slight improvement in the data, by better observations, or by taking into fuller consideration the special circumstances of the case, is of more use than the most elaborate application of the calculus to probabilities founded on the data in their previous state of inferiority. The neglect of this obvious reflection has given rise to misapplications of the calculus of probabilities which have made it the real opprobrium of mathematics. It is sufficient to refer to the applications made of it to the credibility of witnesses, and to the correctness of the verdicts of juries. In regard to the first, common sense would dictate that it is impossible to strike a general average of the veracity, and other qualifications for true testimony, of mankind, or of any class of them; and even if it were possible, the employment of it for such a purpose implies a misapprehension of the use of averages: which serve indeed to protect those whose interest is at stake, against mistaking the general result of large masses of instances, but are of extremely small value as grounds of expectation in any one individual instance, unless the case be one of those in which the great majority of individual instances do not differ much from the average. In the case of a witness, persons of common sense would draw their conclusions from the degree of consistency of his statements, his conduct under cross-examination, and the relation of the case itself to his interests, his partialities, and his mental capacity, instead of applying so rude a standard (even if it were capable of being verified) as the ratio between the number of true and the number of erroneous statements which he may be supposed to make in the course of his life.
Again, on the subject of juries, or other tribunals, some mathematicians have set out from the proposition that the judgment of any one judge, or juryman, is, at least in some small degree, more likely to be right than wrong, and have concluded that the chance of a number of persons concurring in a wrong verdict is diminished, the more the number is increased; so that if the judges are only made sufficiently numerous, the correctness of the judgment may be reduced almost to certainty. I say nothing of the disregard shown to the effect produced on the moral position of the judges by multiplying their numbers; the virtual destruction of their individual responsibility, and weakening of the application of their minds to the subject. I remark only the fallacy of reasoning from a wide average, to cases necessarily differing greatly from any average. It may be true that taking all causes one with another, the opinion of any one of the judges would be oftener right than wrong; but the argument forgets that in all but the more simple cases, in all cases in which it is really of much consequence what the tribunal is, the proposition might probably be reversed; besides which, the cause of error, whether arising from the intricacy of the case or from some common prejudice or mental infirmity, if it acted upon one judge, would be extremely likely to affect all the others in the same manner, or at least a majority, and thus render a wrong instead of a right decision more probable, the more the number was increased.
These are but samples of the errors frequently committed by men who, having made themselves familiar with the difficult formulæ which algebra affords for the estimation of chances under suppositions of a complex character, like better to employ those formulæ in computing what are the probabilities to a person half informed about a case, than to look out for means of being better informed. Before applying the doctrine of chances to any scientific purpose, the foundation must be laid for an evaluation of the chances, by possessing ourselves of the utmost attainable amount of positive knowledge. The knowledge required is that of the comparative frequency with which the different events in fact occur. For the purposes, therefore, of the present work, it is allowable to suppose, that conclusions respecting the probability of a fact of a particular kind, rest on our knowledge of the proportion between the cases in which facts of that kind occur, and those in which they do not occur: this knowledge being either derived from specific experiment, or deduced from our knowledge of the causes in operation which tend to produce, compared with those which tend to prevent, the fact in question.
Such calculation of chances is grounded on an induction; and to render the calculation legitimate, the induction must be a valid one. It is not less an induction, though it does not prove that the event occurs in all cases of a given description, but only that out of a given number of such cases, it occurs in about so many. The fraction which mathematicians use to designate the probability of an event, is the ratio of these two numbers; the ascertained proportion between the number of cases in which the event occurs, and the sum of all the cases, those in which it occurs and in which it does not occur taken together. In playing at cross and pile, the description of cases concerned are throws, and the probability of cross is one-half, because if we throw often enough, cross is thrown about once in every two throws. In the cast of a die, the probability of ace is one-sixth; not simply because there are six possible throws, of which ace is one, and because we do not know any reason why one should turn up rather than another; though I have admitted the validity of this ground in default of a better; but because we do actually know, either by reasoning or by experience, that in a hundred, or a million of throws, ace is thrown about one-sixth of that number, or once in six times.
§ 4. I say, "either by reasoning or by experience;" meaning specific experience. But in estimating probabilities, it is not a matter of indifference from which of these two sources we derive our assurance. The probability of events as calculated from their mere frequency in past experience, affords a less secure basis for practical guidance, than their probability as deduced from an equally accurate knowledge of the frequency of occurrence of their causes.
The generalization, that an event occurs in ten out of every hundred cases of a given description, is as real an induction as if the generalization were that it occurs in all cases. But when we arrive at the conclusion by merely counting instances in actual experience, and comparing the number of cases in which A has been present with the number in which it has been absent, the evidence is only that of the method of Agreement, and the conclusion amounts only to an empirical law. We can make a step beyond this when we can ascend to the causes on which the occurrence of A or its non-occurrence will depend, and form an estimate of the comparative frequency of the causes favourable and of those unfavourable to the occurrence. These are data of a higher order, by which the empirical law derived from a mere numerical comparison of affirmative and negative instances will be either corrected or confirmed, and in either case we shall obtain a more correct measure of probability than is given by that numerical comparison. It has been well remarked that in the kind of examples by which the doctrine of chances is usually illustrated, that of balls in a box, the estimate of probabilities is supported by reasons of causation, stronger than specific experience. "What is the reason that in a box where there are nine black balls and one white, we expect to draw a black ball nine times as much (in other words, nine times as often, frequency being the gauge of intensity in expectation) as a white? Obviously because the local conditions are nine times as favourable, because the hand may alight in nine places and get a black ball, while it can only alight in one place and find a white ball; just for the same reason that we do not expect to succeed in finding a friend in a crowd, the conditions in order that we and he should come together being many and difficult. This of course would not hold to the same extent were the white balls of smaller size than the black, neither would the probability remain the same: the larger ball would be much more likely to meet the hand."[19]
It is, in fact, evident, that when once causation is admitted as an universal law, our expectation of events can only be rationally grounded on that law. To a person who recognises that every event depends on causes, a thing's having happened once is a reason for expecting it to happen again, only because proving that there exists, or is liable to exist, a cause adequate to produce it.[20] The frequency of the particular event, apart from all surmise respecting its cause, can give rise to no other induction than that per enumerationem simplicem; and the precarious inferences derived from this, are superseded, and disappear from the field, as soon as the principle of causation makes its appearance there.
Notwithstanding, however, the abstract superiority of an estimate of probability grounded on causes, it is a fact that in almost all cases in which chances admit of estimation sufficiently precise to render their numerical appreciation of any practical value, the numerical data are not drawn from knowledge of the causes, but from experience of the events themselves. The probabilities of life at different ages, or in different climates; the probabilities of recovery from a particular disease; the chances of the birth of male or female offspring; the chances of the destruction of houses or other property by fire; the chances of the loss of a ship in a particular voyage; are deduced from bills of mortality, returns from hospitals, registers of births, of shipwrecks, &c., that is, from the observed frequency not of the causes, but of the effects. The reason is, that in all these classes of facts, the causes are either not amenable to direct observation at all, or not with the requisite precision, and we have no means of judging of their frequency except from the empirical law afforded by the frequency of the effects. The inference does not the less depend on causation alone. We reason from an effect to a similar effect by passing through the cause. If the actuary of an insurance office infers from his tables that among a hundred persons now living, of a particular age, five on the average will attain the age of seventy, his inference is legitimate, not for the simple reason that this is the proportion who have lived till seventy in times past, but because the fact of their having so lived shows that this is the proportion existing, at that place and time, between the causes which prolong life to the age of seventy, and those tending to bring it to an earlier close.[21]
§ 5. From the preceding principles it is easy to deduce the demonstration of that theorem of the doctrine of probabilities, which is the foundation of its application to inquiries for ascertaining the occurrence of a given event, or the reality of an individual fact. The signs or evidences by which a fact is usually proved, are some of its consequences: and the inquiry hinges upon determining what cause is most likely to have produced a given effect. The theorem applicable to such investigations is the Sixth Principle in Laplace's Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités, which is described by him as the "fundamental principle of that branch of the Analysis of Chances, which consists in ascending from events to their causes."[22]
Given an effect to be accounted for, and there being several causes which might have produced it, but of the presence of which in the particular case nothing is known; the probability that the effect was produced by any one of these causes is as the antecedent probability of the cause, multiplied by the probability that the cause, if it existed, would have produced the given effect.
Let M be the effect, and A, B, two causes, by either of which it might have been produced. To find the probability that it was produced by the one and not by the other, ascertain which of the two is most likely to have existed, and which of them, if it did exist, was most likely to produce the effect M: the probability sought is a compound of these two probabilities.
Case I. Let the causes be both alike in the second respect; either A or B, when it exists, being supposed equally likely (or equally certain) to produce M; but let A be in itself twice as likely as B to exist, that is, twice as frequent a phenomenon. Then it is twice as likely to have existed in this case, and to have been the cause which produced M.
For, since A exists in nature twice as often as B; in any 300 cases in which one or other existed, A has existed 200 times and B 100. But either A or B must have existed wherever M is produced: therefore in 300 times that M is produced, A was the producing cause 200 times, B only 100, that is, in the ratio of 2 to 1. Thus, then, if the causes are alike in their capacity of producing the effect, the probability as to which actually produced it, is in the ratio of their antecedent probabilities.
Case II. Reversing the last hypothesis, let us suppose that the causes are equally frequent, equally likely to have existed, but not equally likely, if they did exist, to produce M: that in three times in which A occurs, it produces that effect twice, while B, in three times, produces it only once. Since the two causes are equally frequent in their occurrence; in every six times that either one or the other exists, A exists three times and B three times. A, of its three times, produces M in two; B, of its three times, produces M in one. Thus, in the whole six times, M is only produced thrice; but of that thrice it is produced twice by A, once only by B. Consequently, when the antecedent probabilities of the causes are equal, the chances that the effect was produced by them are in the ratio of the probabilities that if they did exist they would produce the effect.
Case III. The third case, that in which the causes are unlike in both respects, is solved by what has preceded. For, when a quantity depends on two other quantities, in such a manner that while either of them remains constant it is proportional to the other, it must necessarily be proportional to the product of the two quantities, the product being the only function of the two which obeys that law of variation. Therefore, the probability that M was produced by either cause, is as the antecedent probability of the cause, multiplied by the probability that if it existed it would produce M. Which was to be demonstrated.
Or we may prove the third case as we proved the first and second. Let A be twice as frequent as B; and let them also be unequally likely, when they exist, to produce M: let A produce it twice in four times, B thrice in four times. The antecedent probability of A is to that of B as 2 to 1; the probabilities of their producing M are as 2 to 3; the product of these ratios is the ratio of 4 to 3: and this will be the ratio of the probabilities that A or B was the producing cause in the given instance. For, since A is twice as frequent as B, out of twelve cases in which one or other exists, A exists in 8 and B in 4. But of its eight cases, A, by the supposition, produces M in only 4, while B of its four cases produces M in 3. M, therefore, is only produced at all in seven of the twelve cases; but in four of these it is produced by A, in three by B; hence, the probabilities of its being produced by A and by B are as 4 to 3, and are expressed by the fractions 4/7 and 3/7. Which was to be demonstrated.
§ 6. It remains to examine the bearing of the doctrine of chances on the peculiar problem which occupied us in the preceding chapter, namely, how to distinguish coincidences which are casual from those which are the result of law; from those in which the facts which accompany or follow one another are somehow connected through causation.
The doctrine of chances affords means by which, if we knew the average number of coincidences to be looked for between two phenomena connected only casually, we could determine how often any given deviation from that average will occur by chance. If the probability of any casual coincidence, considered in itself, be 1/m, the probability that the same coincidence will be repeated n times in succession is 1/mn. For example, in one throw of a die the probability of ace being 1/6; the probability of throwing ace twice in succession will be 1 divided by the square of 6, or 1/36. For ace is thrown at the first throw once in six, or six in thirty-six times, and of those six, the die being cast again, ace will be thrown but once; being altogether once in thirty-six times. The chance of the same cast three times successively is, by a similar reasoning, 1/63 or 1/216: that is, the event will happen, on a large average, only once in two hundred and sixteen throws.
We have thus a rule by which to estimate the probability that any given series of coincidences arises from chance; provided we can measure correctly the probability of a single coincidence. If we can obtain an equally precise expression for the probability that the same series of coincidences arises from causation, we should only have to compare the numbers. This however, can rarely be done. Let us see what degree of approximation can practically be made to the necessary precision.
[15] Supra, book iii. ch. x. § 2.
[21] The writer last quoted says that the valuation of chances by comparing the number of cases in which the event occurs with the number in which it does not occur, "would generally be wholly erroneous," and "is not the true theory of probability." It is at least that which forms the foundation of insurance, and of all those calculations of chances in the business of life which experience so abundantly verifies. The reason which the reviewer gives for rejecting the theory, is that it "would regard an event as certain which had hitherto never failed; which is exceedingly far from the truth, even for a very large number of constant successes." This is not a defect in a particular theory, but in any theory of chances. No principle of evaluation can provide for such a case as that which the reviewer supposes. If an event has never once failed, in a number of trials sufficient to eliminate chance, it really has all the certainty which can be given by an empirical law: it is certain during the continuance of the same collocation of causes which existed during the observations. If it ever fails, it is in consequence of some change in that collocation. Now, no theory of chances will enable us to infer the future probability of an event from the past, if the causes in operation, capable of influencing the event, have intermediately undergone a change.
[14] Supra, book iii. ch. v. § 7.
[16] In the preceding discussion, the mean is spoken of as if it were exactly the same thing with the average. But the mean for purposes of inductive inquiry, is not the average, or arithmetical mean, though in a familiar illustration of the theory the difference may be disregarded. If the deviations on one side of the average are much more numerous than those on the other (these last being fewer but greater), the effect due to the invariable cause, as distinct from the variable ones, will not coincide with the average, but will be either below or above the average, whichever be the side on which the greatest number of the instances are found. This follows from a truth, ascertained both inductively and deductively, that small deviations from the true central point are greatly more frequent than large ones. The mathematical law is, "that the most probable determination of one or more invariable elements from observation is that in which the sum of the squares of the individual aberrations," or deviations, "shall be the least possible." See this principle stated, and its grounds popularly explained, by Sir John Herschel, in his review of Quetelet on Probabilities, Essays, pp. 395 et seq.
[12] Thus, water, of which eight-ninths in weight are oxygen, dissolves most bodies which contain a high proportion of oxygen, such as all the nitrates, (which have more oxygen than any others of the common salts,) most of the sulphates, many of the carbonates, &c. Again, bodies largely composed of combustible elements, like hydrogen and carbon, are soluble in bodies of similar composition; rosin, for instance, will dissolve in alcohol, tar in oil of turpentine. This empirical generalization is far from being universally true; no doubt because it is a remote, and therefore easily defeated, result of general laws too deep for us at present to penetrate; but it will probably in time suggest processes of inquiry, leading to the discovery of those laws.
[18] It even appears to me that the calculation of chances, where there are no data grounded either on special experience or on special inference, must, in an immense majority of cases, break down, from sheer impossibility of assigning any principle by which to be guided in setting out the list of possibilities. In the case of the coloured balls we have no difficulty in making the enumeration, because we ourselves determine what the possibilities shall be. But suppose a case more analogous to those which occur in nature: instead of three colours, let there be in the box all possible colours: we being supposed ignorant of the comparative frequency with which different colours occur in nature, or in the productions of art. How is the list of cases to be made out? Is every distinct shade to count as a colour? If so, is the test to be a common eye, or an educated eye, a painter's for instance? On the answer to these questions would depend whether the chances against some particular colour would be estimated at ten, twenty, or perhaps five hundred to one. While if we knew from experience that the particular colour occurs on an average a certain number of times in every hundred or thousand, we should not require to know anything either of the frequency or of the number of the other possibilities.
[22] Pp. 18, 19. The theorem is not stated by Laplace in the exact terms in which I have stated it; but the identity of import of the two modes of expression is easily demonstrable.
[17] Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités, fifth Paris Edition, p. 7.
[13] Or (according to Laplace's theory) the sun and the sun's rotation.
[20] "If this be not so, why do we feel so much more probability added by the first instance, than by any single subsequent instance? Why, except that the first instance gives us its possibility (a cause adequate to it), while every other only gives us the frequency of its conditions? If no reference to a cause be supposed, possibility would have no meaning; yet it is clear, that, antecedent to its happening, we might have supposed the event impossible, i.e., have believed that there was no physical energy really existing in the world equal to producing it.... After the first time of happening, which is, then, more important to the whole probability than any other single instance (because proving the possibility), the number of times becomes important as an index to the intensity or extent of the cause, and its independence of any particular time. If we took the case of a tremendous leap, for instance, and wished to form an estimate of the probability of its succeeding a certain number of times; the first instance, by showing its possibility (before doubtful) is of the most importance; but every succeeding leap shows the power to be more perfectly under control, greater and more invariable, and so increases the probability; and no one would think of reasoning in this case straight from one instance to the next, without referring to the physical energy which each leap indicated. Is it not then clear that we do not ever" (let us rather say, that we do not in an advanced state of our knowledge) "conclude directly from the happening of an event to the probability of its happening again; but that we refer to the cause, regarding the past cases as an index to the cause, and the cause as our guide to the future?"—Ibid.
[19] Prospective Review for February 1850.
The question falls within Laplace's sixth principle, just demonstrated. The given fact, that is to say, the series of coincidences, may have originated either in a casual conjunction of causes, or in a law of nature. The probabilities, therefore, that the fact originated in these two modes, are as their antecedent probabilities, multiplied by the probabilities that if they existed they would produce the effect. But the particular combination of chances, if it occurred, or the law of nature if real, would certainly produce the series of coincidences. The probabilities, therefore, that the coincidences are produced by the two causes in question, are as the antecedent probabilities of the causes. One of these, the antecedent probability of the combination of mere chances which would produce the given result, is an appreciable quantity. The antecedent probability of the other supposition may be susceptible of a more or less exact estimation, according to the nature of the case.
In some cases, the coincidence, supposing it to be the result of causation at all, must be the result of a known cause: as the succession of aces, if not accidental, must arise from the loading of the die. In such cases we may be able to form a conjecture as to the antecedent probability of such a circumstance, from the characters of the parties concerned, or other such evidence; but it would be impossible to estimate that probability with anything like numerical precision. The counter-probability, however, that of the accidental origin of the coincidence, dwindling so rapidly as it does at each new trial; the stage is soon reached at which the chance of unfairness in the die, however small in itself, must be greater than that of a casual coincidence: and on this ground, a practical decision can generally be come to without much hesitation, if there be the power of repeating the experiment.
When, however, the coincidence is one which cannot be accounted for by any known cause, and the connexion between the two phenomena, if produced by causation, must be the result of some law of nature hitherto unknown; which is the case we had in view in the last chapter; then, though the probability of a casual coincidence may be capable of appreciation, that of the counter-supposition, the existence of an undiscovered law of nature, is clearly unsusceptible of even an approximate valuation. In order to have the data which such a case would require, it would be necessary to know what proportion of all the individual sequences or coexistences occurring in nature are the result of law, and what proportion are mere casual coincidences. It being evident that we cannot form any plausible conjecture as to this proportion, much less appreciate it numerically, we cannot attempt any precise estimation of the comparative probabilities. But of this we are sure, that the detection of an unknown law of nature—of some previously unrecognised constancy of conjunction among phenomena—is no uncommon event. If, therefore, the number of instances in which a coincidence is observed, over and above that which would arise on the average from the mere concurrence of chances, be such that so great an amount of coincidences from accident alone would be an extremely uncommon event; we have reason to conclude that the coincidence is the effect of causation, and may be received (subject to correction from further experience) as an empirical law. Further than this, in point of precision, we cannot go; nor, in most cases, is greater precision required, for the solution of any practical doubt.[23]
CHAPTER XIX.
OF THE EXTENSION OF DERIVATIVE LAWS TO ADJACENT CASES.
§ 1. We have had frequent occasion to notice the inferior generality of derivative laws, compared with the ultimate laws from which they are derived. This inferiority, which affects not only the extent of the propositions themselves, but their degree of certainty within that extent, is most conspicuous in the uniformities of coexistence and sequence obtaining between effects which depend ultimately on different primeval causes. Such uniformities will only obtain where there exists the same collocation of those primeval causes. If the collocation varies, though the laws themselves remain the same, a totally different set of derivative uniformities may, and generally will, be the result.
Even where the derivative uniformity is between different effects of the same cause, it will by no means obtain as universally as the law of the cause itself. If a and b accompany or succeed one another as effects of the cause A, it by no means follows that A is the only cause which can produce them, or that if there be another cause, as B, capable of producing a, it must produce b likewise. The conjunction therefore of a and b perhaps does not hold universally, but only in the instances in which a arises from A. When it is produced by a cause other than A, a and b may be dissevered. Day (for example) is always in our experience followed by night; but day is not the cause of night; both are successive effects of a common cause, the periodical passage of the spectator into and out of the earth's shadow, consequent on the earth's rotation, and on the illuminating property of the sun. If, therefore, day is ever produced by a different cause or set of causes from this, day will not, or at least may not, be followed by night. On the sun's own surface, for instance, this may be the case.
Finally, even when the derivative uniformity is itself a law of causation (resulting from the combination of several causes), it is not altogether independent of collocations. If a cause supervenes, capable of wholly or partially counteracting the effect of any one of the conjoined causes, the effect will no longer conform to the derivative law. While, therefore, each ultimate law is only liable to frustration from one set of counteracting causes, the derivative law is liable to it from several. Now, the possibility of the occurrence of counteracting causes which do not arise from any of the conditions involved in the law itself, depends on the original collocations.
It is true that (as we formerly remarked) laws of causation, whether ultimate or derivative, are, in most cases, fulfilled even when counteracted; the cause produces its effect, though that effect is destroyed by something else. That the effect may be frustrated, is, therefore, no objection to the universality of laws of causation. But it is fatal to the universality of the sequences or coexistences of effects, which compose the greater part of the derivative laws flowing from laws of causation. When, from the law of a certain combination of causes, there results a certain order in the effects; as from the combination of a single sun with the rotation of an opaque body round its axis, there results, on the whole surface of that opaque body, an alternation of day and night; then if we suppose one of the combined causes counteracted, the rotation stopped, the sun extinguished, or a second sun superadded, the truth of that particular law of causation is in no way affected; it is still true that one sun shining on an opaque revolving body will alternately produce day and night; but since the sun no longer does shine on such a body, the derivative uniformity, the succession of day and night on the given planet, is no longer true. Those derivative uniformities, therefore, which are not laws of causation, are (except in the rare case of their depending on one cause alone, not on a combination of causes,) always more or less contingent on collocations; and are hence subject to the characteristic infirmity of empirical laws, that of being admissible only where the collocations are known by experience to be such as are requisite for the truth of the law, that is, only within the conditions of time and place confirmed by actual observation.
§ 2. This principle, when stated in general terms, seems clear and indisputable; yet many of the ordinary judgments of mankind, the propriety of which is not questioned, have at least the semblance of being inconsistent with it. On what grounds, it may be asked, do we expect that the sun will rise to-morrow? To-morrow is beyond the limits of time comprehended in our observations. They have extended over some thousands of years past, but they do not include the future. Yet we infer with confidence that the sun will rise to-morrow; and nobody doubts that we are entitled to do so. Let us consider what is the warrant for this confidence.
In the example in question, we know the causes on which the derivative uniformity depends. They are, the sun giving out light, the earth in a state of rotation and intercepting light. The induction which shows these to be the real causes, and not merely prior effects of a common cause, being complete; the only circumstances which could defeat the derivative law are such as would destroy or counteract one or other of the combined causes. While the causes exist, and are not counteracted, the effect will continue. If they exist and are not counteracted to-morrow, the sun will rise to-morrow.
Since the causes, namely the sun and the earth, the one in the state of giving out light, the other in a state of rotation, will exist until something destroys them; all depends on the probabilities of their destruction, or of their counteraction. We know by observation (omitting the inferential proofs of an existence for thousands of ages anterior), that these phenomena have continued for (say) five thousand years. Within that time there has existed no cause sufficient to diminish them appreciably; nor which has counteracted their effect in any appreciable degree. The chance, therefore, that the sun may not rise to-morrow, amounts to the chance that some cause, which has not manifested itself in the smallest degree during five thousand years, will exist to-morrow in such intensity as to destroy the sun or the earth, the sun's light or the earth's rotation, or to produce an immense disturbance in the effect resulting from those causes.
Now, if such a cause will exist to-morrow, or at any future time, some cause, proximate or remote, of that cause must exist now, and must have existed during the whole of the five thousand years. If, therefore, the sun do not rise to-morrow, it will be because some cause has existed, the effects of which though during five thousand years they have not amounted to a perceptible quantity, will in one day become overwhelming. Since this cause has not been recognised during such an interval of time, by observers stationed on our earth, it must, if it exist, be either some agent whose effects develop themselves gradually and very slowly, or one which existed in regions beyond our observation, and is now on the point of arriving in our part of the universe. Now all causes which we have experience of, act according to laws incompatible with the supposition that their effects, after accumulating so slowly as to be imperceptible for five thousand years, should start into immensity in a single day. No mathematical law of proportion between an effect and the quantity or relations of its cause, could produce such contradictory results. The sudden development of an effect of which there was no previous trace, always arises from the coming together of several distinct causes, not previously conjoined; but if such sudden conjunction is destined to take place, the causes, or their causes, must have existed during the entire five thousand years; and their not having once come together during that period, shows how rare that particular combination is. We have, therefore, the warrant of a rigid induction for considering it probable, in a degree undistinguishable from certainty, that the known conditions requisite for the sun's rising will exist to-morrow.
§ 3. But this extension of derivative laws, not causative, beyond the limits of observation, can only be to adjacent cases. If instead of to-morrow we had said this day twenty thousand years, the inductions would have been anything but conclusive. That a cause which, in opposition to very powerful causes, produced no perceptible effect during five thousand years, should produce a very considerable one by the end of twenty thousand, has nothing in it which is not in conformity with our experience of causes. We know many agents, the effect of which in a short period does not amount to a perceptible quantity, but by accumulating for a much longer period becomes considerable. Besides, looking at the immense multitude of the heavenly bodies, their vast distances, and the rapidity of the motion of such of them as are known to move, it is a supposition not at all contradictory to experience that some body may be in motion towards us, or we towards it, within the limits of whose influence we have not come during five thousand years, but which in twenty thousand more may be producing effects upon us of the most extraordinary kind. Or the fact which is capable of preventing sunrise may be, not the cumulative effect of one cause, but some new combination of causes; and the chances favourable to that combination, though they have not produced it once in five thousand years, may produce it once in twenty thousand. So that the inductions which authorize us to expect future events, grow weaker and weaker the further we look into the future, and at length become inappreciable.
We have considered the probabilities of the sun's rising to-morrow, as derived from the real laws, that is, from the laws of the causes on which that uniformity is dependent. Let us now consider how the matter would have stood if the uniformity had been known only as an empirical law; if we had not been aware that the sun's light, and the earth's rotation (or the sun's motion), were the causes on which the periodical occurrence of daylight depends. We could have extended this empirical law to cases adjacent in time, though not to so great a distance of time as we can now. Having evidence that the effects had remained unaltered and been punctually conjoined for five thousand years, we could infer that the unknown causes on which the conjunction is dependent had existed undiminished and uncounteracted during the same period. The same conclusions, therefore, would follow as in the preceding case; except that we should only know that during five thousand years nothing had occurred to defeat perceptibly this particular effect; while, when we know the causes, we have the additional assurance, that during that interval no such change has been noticeable in the causes themselves, as by any degree of multiplication or length of continuance could defeat the effect.
To this must be added, that when we know the causes, we may be able to judge whether there exists any known cause capable of counteracting them; while as long as they are unknown, we cannot be sure but that if we did know them, we could predict their destruction from causes actually in existence. A bedridden savage, who had never seen the cataract of Niagara, but who lived within hearing of it, might imagine that the sound he heard would endure for ever; but if he knew it to be the effect of a rush of waters over a barrier of rock which is progressively wearing away, he would know that within a number of ages which may be calculated, it will be heard no more. In proportion, therefore, to our ignorance of the causes on which the empirical law depends, we can be less assured that it will continue to hold good; and the farther we look into futurity, the less improbable is it that some one of the causes, whose coexistence gives rise to the derivative uniformity, may be destroyed or counteracted. With every prolongation of time, the chances multiply of such an event, that is to say, its non-occurrence hitherto becomes a less guarantee of its not occurring within the given time. If, then, it is only to cases which in point of time are adjacent (or nearly adjacent) to those which we have actually observed, that any derivative law, not of causation, can be extended with an assurance equivalent to certainty, much more is this true of a merely empirical law. Happily, for the purposes of life it is to such cases alone that we can almost ever have occasion to extend them.
In respect of place, it might seem that a merely empirical law could not be extended even to adjacent cases; that we could have no assurance of its being true in any place where it has not been specially observed. The past duration of a cause is a guarantee for its future existence, unless something occurs to destroy it; but the existence of a cause in one or any number of places, is no guarantee for its existence in any other place, since there is no uniformity in the collocations of primeval causes. When, therefore, an empirical law is extended beyond the local limits within which it has been found true by observation, the cases to which it is thus extended must be such as are presumably within the influence of the same individual agents. If we discover a new planet within the known bounds of the solar system (or even beyond those bounds, but indicating its connexion with the system by revolving round the sun), we may conclude, with great probability, that it revolves on its axis. For all the known planets do so; and this uniformity points to some common cause, antecedent to the first records of astronomical observation: and though the nature of this cause can only be matter of conjecture, yet if it be, as is not unlikely, and as Laplace's theory supposes, not merely the same kind of cause, but the same individual cause (such as an impulse given to all the bodies at once), that cause, acting at the extreme points of the space occupied by the sun and planets, is likely, unless defeated by some counteracting cause, to have acted at every intermediate point, and probably somewhat beyond; and therefore acted, in all probability, upon the supposed newly-discovered planet.
When, therefore, effects which are always found conjoined, can be traced with any probability to an identical (and not merely a similar) origin, we may with the same probability extend the empirical law of their conjunction to all places within the extreme local boundaries within which the fact has been observed; subject to the possibility of counteracting causes in some portion of the field. Still more confidently may we do so when the law is not merely empirical; when the phenomena which we find conjoined are effects of ascertained causes, from the laws of which the conjunction of their effects is deducible. In that case, we may both extend the derivative uniformity over a larger space, and with less abatement for the chance of counteracting causes. The first, because instead of the local boundaries of our observation of the fact itself, we may include the extreme boundaries of the ascertained influence of its causes. Thus the succession of day and night, we know, holds true of all the bodies of the solar system except the sun itself; but we know this only because we are acquainted with the causes: if we were not, we could not extend the proposition beyond the orbits of the earth and moon, at both extremities of which we have the evidence of observation for its truth. With respect to the probability of counteracting causes, it has been seen that this calls for a greater abatement of confidence, in proportion to our ignorance of the causes on which the phenomena depend. On both accounts, therefore, a derivative law which we know how to resolve, is susceptible of a greater extension to cases adjacent in place, than a merely empirical law.
CHAPTER XX.
OF ANALOGY.
§ 1. The word Analogy, as the name of a mode of reasoning, is generally taken for some kind of argument supposed to be of an inductive nature, but not amounting to a complete induction. There is no word, however, which is used more loosely, or in a greater variety of senses, than Analogy. It sometimes stands for arguments which may be examples of the most rigorous Induction. Archbishop Whately, for instance, following Ferguson and other writers, defines Analogy conformably to its primitive acceptation, that which was given to it by mathematicians, Resemblance of Relations. In this sense, when a country which has sent out colonies is termed the mother country, the expression is analogical, signifying that the colonies of a country stand in the same relation to her in which children stand to their parents. And if any inference be drawn from this resemblance of relations, as, for instance, that obedience or affection is due from colonies to the mother country, this is called reasoning by analogy. Or if it be argued that a nation is most beneficially governed by an assembly elected by the people, from the admitted fact that other associations for a common purpose, such as joint-stock companies, are best managed by a committee chosen by the parties interested; this, too, is an argument from analogy in the preceding sense, because its foundation is, not that a nation is like a joint stock company, or Parliament like a board of directors, but that Parliament stands in the same relation to the nation in which a board of directors stands to a joint stock company. Now, in an argument of this nature, there is no inherent inferiority of conclusiveness. Like other arguments from resemblance, it may amount to nothing, or it may be a perfect and conclusive induction. The circumstance in which the two cases resemble, may be capable of being shown to be the material circumstance; to be that on which all the consequences, necessary to be taken into account in the particular discussion, depend. In the example last given, the resemblance is one of relation; the fundamentum relationis being the management by a few persons, of affairs in which a much greater number are interested along with them. Now, some may contend that this circumstance which is common to the two cases, and the various consequences which follow from it, have the chief share in determining all the effects which make up what we term good or bad administration. If they can establish this, their argument has the force of a rigorous induction; if they cannot, they are said to have failed in proving the analogy between the two cases; a mode of speech which implies that when the analogy can be proved, the argument founded on it cannot be resisted.
§ 2. It is on the whole more usual, however, to extend the name of analogical evidence to arguments from any sort of resemblance, provided they do not amount to a complete induction: without peculiarly distinguishing resemblance of relations. Analogical reasoning, in this sense, may be reduced to the following formula:—Two things resemble each other in one or more respects; a certain proposition is true of the one; therefore it is true of the other. But we have nothing here by which to discriminate analogy from induction, since this type will serve for all reasoning from experience. In the strictest induction, equally with the faintest analogy, we conclude because A resembles B in one or more properties, that it does so in a certain other property. The difference is, that in the case of a complete induction it has been previously shown, by due comparison of instances, that there is an invariable conjunction between the former property or properties and the latter property; but in what is called analogical reasoning, no such conjunction has been made out. There have been no opportunities of putting in practice the Method of Difference, or even the Method of Agreement; but we conclude (and that is all which the argument of analogy amounts to) that a fact m, known to be true of A, is more likely to be true of B if B agrees with A in some of its properties (even though no connexion is known to exist between m and those properties), than if no resemblance at all could be traced between B and any other thing known to possess the attribute m.
To this argument it is of course requisite, that the properties common to A with B shall be merely not known to be connected with m; they must not be properties known to be unconnected with it. If, either by processes of elimination, or by deduction from previous knowledge of the laws of the properties in question, it can be concluded that they have nothing to do with m, the argument of analogy is put out of court. The supposition must be that m is an effect really dependent on some property of A, but we know not on which. We cannot point out any of the properties of A, which is the cause of m, or united with it by any law. After rejecting all which we know to have nothing to do with it, there remain several between which we are unable to decide: of which remaining properties, B possesses one or more. This accordingly, we consider as affording grounds, of more or less strength, for concluding by analogy that B possesses the attribute m.
There can be no doubt that every such resemblance which can be pointed out between B and A, affords some degree of probability, beyond what would otherwise exist, in favour of the conclusion drawn from it. If B resembled A in all its ultimate properties, its possessing the attribute m would be a certainty, not a probability: and every resemblance which can be shown to exist between them, places it by so much the nearer to that point. If the resemblance be in an ultimate property, there will be resemblance in all the derivative properties dependent on that ultimate property, and of these m may be one. If the resemblance be in a derivative property, there is reason to expect resemblance in the ultimate property on which it depends, and in the other derivative properties dependent on the same ultimate property. Every resemblance which can be shown to exist, affords ground for expecting an indefinite number of other resemblances: the particular resemblance sought will, therefore, be oftener found among things thus known to resemble, than among things between which we know of no resemblance.[24]
For example, I might infer that there are probably inhabitants in the moon, because there are inhabitants on the earth, in the sea, and in the air: and this is the evidence of analogy. The circumstance of having inhabitants is here assumed not to be an ultimate property, but (as is reasonable to suppose) a consequence of other properties; and depending, therefore, in the case of the earth, on some of its properties as a portion of the universe, but on which of those properties we know not. Now the moon resembles the earth in being a solid, opaque, nearly spherical substance, appearing to contain, or to have contained, active volcanoes; receiving heat and light from the sun, in about the same quantity as our earth; revolving on its axis; composed of materials which gravitate, and obeying all the various laws resulting from that property. And I think no one will deny that if this were all that was known of the moon, the existence of inhabitants in that luminary would derive from these various resemblances to the earth, a greater degree of probability than it would otherwise have: though the amount of the augmentation it would be useless to attempt to estimate.
If, however, every resemblance proved between B and A, in any point not known to be immaterial with respect to m, forms some additional reason for presuming that B has the attribute m; it is clear, è contra, that every dissimilarity which can be proved between them, furnishes a counter-probability of the same nature on the other side. It is not indeed unusual that different ultimate properties should, in some particular instances, produce the same derivative property; but on the whole it is certain that things which differ in their ultimate properties, will differ at least as much in the aggregate of their derivative properties, and that the differences which are unknown will on the average of cases bear some proportion to those which are known. There will, therefore, be a competition between the known points of agreement and the known points of difference in A and B; and according as the one or the other may be deemed to preponderate, the probability derived from analogy will be for or against B's having the property m. The moon, for instance, agrees with the earth in the circumstances already mentioned; but differs in being smaller, in having its surface more unequal, and apparently volcanic throughout, in having, at least on the side next the earth, no atmosphere sufficient to refract light, no clouds, and (it is therefore concluded) no water. These differences, considered merely as such, might perhaps balance the resemblances, so that analogy would afford no presumption either way. But considering that some of the circumstances which are wanting on the moon are among those which, on the earth, are found to be indispensable conditions of animal life, we may conclude that if that phenomenon does exist in the moon, (or at all events on the nearer side,) it must be as an effect of causes totally different from those on which it depends here; as a consequence, therefore, of the moon's differences from the earth, not of the points of agreement. Viewed in this light, all the resemblances which exist become presumptions against, not in favour of, the moon's being inhabited. Since life cannot exist there in the manner in which it exists here, the greater the resemblance of the lunar world to the terrestrial in other respects, the less reason we have to believe that it can contain life.
There are, however, other bodies in our system, between which and the earth there is a much closer resemblance; which possess an atmosphere, clouds, consequently water (or some fluid analogous to it), and even give strong indications of snow in their polar regions; while the cold, or heat, though differing greatly on the average from ours, is, in some parts at least of those planets, possibly not more extreme than in some regions of our own which are habitable. To balance these agreements, the ascertained differences are chiefly in the average light and heat, velocity of rotation, density of material, intensity of gravity, and similar circumstances of a secondary kind. With regard to these planets, therefore, the argument of analogy gives a decided preponderance in favour of their resembling the earth in any of its derivative properties, such as that of having inhabitants; though, when we consider how immeasurably multitudinous are those of their properties which we are entirely ignorant of, compared with the few which we know, we can attach but trifling weight to any considerations of resemblance in which the known elements bear so inconsiderable a proportion to the unknown.
Besides the competition between analogy and diversity, there may be a competition of conflicting analogies. The new case may be similar in some of its circumstances to cases in which the fact m exists, but in others to cases in which it is known not to exist. Amber has some properties in common with vegetable, others with mineral products. A painting of unknown origin, may resemble, in certain of its characters, known works of a particular master, but in others it may as strikingly resemble those of some other painter. A vase may bear some analogy to works of Grecian, and some to those of Etruscan, or Egyptian art. We are of course supposing that it does not possess any quality which has been ascertained, by a sufficient induction, to be a conclusive mark either of the one or of the other.
§ 3. Since the value of an analogical argument inferring one resemblance from other resemblances without any antecedent evidence of a connexion between them, depends on the extent of ascertained resemblance, compared first with the amount of ascertained difference, and next with the extent of the unexplored region of unascertained properties; it follows that where the resemblance is very great, the ascertained difference very small, and our knowledge of the subject-matter tolerably extensive, the argument from analogy may approach in strength very near to a valid induction. If, after much observation of B, we find that it agrees with A in nine out of ten of its known properties, we may conclude with a probability of nine to one, that it will possess any given derivative property of A. If we discover, for example, an unknown animal or plant, resembling closely some known one in the greater number of the properties we observe in it, but differing in some few, we may reasonably expect to find in the unobserved remainder of its properties, a general agreement with those of the former; but also a difference corresponding proportionately to the amount of observed diversity.
It thus appears that the conclusions derived from analogy are only of any considerable value, when the case to which we reason is an adjacent case; adjacent, not as before, in place or time, but in circumstances. In the case of effects of which the causes are imperfectly or not at all known, when consequently the observed order of their occurrence amounts only to an empirical law, it often happens that the conditions which have coexisted whenever the effect was observed, have been very numerous. Now if a new case presents itself, in which all these conditions do not exist, but the far greater part of them do, some one or a few only being wanting, the inference that the effect will occur, notwithstanding this deficiency of complete resemblance to the cases in which it has been observed, may, though of the nature of analogy, possess a high degree of probability. It is hardly necessary to add that, however considerable this probability may be, no competent inquirer into nature will rest satisfied with it when a complete induction is attainable; but will consider the analogy as a mere guide-post, pointing out the direction in which more rigorous investigations should be prosecuted.
It is in this last respect that considerations of analogy have the highest scientific value. The cases in which analogical evidence affords in itself any very high degree of probability, are, as we have observed, only those in which the resemblance is very close and extensive; but there is no analogy, however faint, which may not be of the utmost value in suggesting experiments or observations that may lead to more positive conclusions. When the agents and their effects are out of the reach of further observation and experiment, as in the speculations already alluded to respecting the moon and planets, such slight probabilities are no more than an interesting theme for the pleasant exercise of imagination; but any suspicion, however slight, that sets an ingenious person at work to contrive an experiment, or affords a reason for trying one experiment rather than another, may be of the greatest benefit to science.
On this ground, though I cannot accept as positive doctrines any of those scientific hypotheses which are unsusceptible of being ultimately brought to the test of actual induction, such, for instance, as the two theories of light, the emission theory of the last century, and the undulatory theory which predominates in the present, I am yet unable to agree with those who consider such hypotheses to be worthy of entire disregard. As is well said by Hartley (and concurred in by a thinker in general so diametrically opposed to Hartley's opinions as Dugald Stewart), "any hypothesis which has so much plausibility as to explain a considerable number of facts, helps us to digest these facts in proper order, to bring new ones to light, and make experimenta crucis for the sake of future inquirers."[25] If an hypothesis both explains known facts, and has led to the prediction of others previously unknown, and since verified by experience, the laws of the phenomenon which is the subject of inquiry must bear at least a great similarity to those of the class of phenomena to which the hypothesis assimilates it; and since the analogy which extends so far may probably extend farther, nothing is more likely to suggest experiments tending to throw light upon the real properties of the phenomenon, than the following out such an hypothesis. But to this end it is by no means necessary that the hypothesis be mistaken for a scientific truth. On the contrary, that illusion is in this respect, as in every other, an impediment to the progress of real knowledge, by leading inquirers to restrict themselves arbitrarily to the particular hypothesis which is most accredited at the time, instead of looking out for every class of phenomena between the laws of which and those of the given phenomenon any analogy exists, and trying all such experiments as may tend to the discovery of ulterior analogies pointing in the same direction.
CHAPTER XXI.
OF THE EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF UNIVERSAL CAUSATION.
§ 1. We have now completed our review of the logical processes by which the laws, or uniformities, of the sequence of phenomena, and those uniformities in their coexistence which depend on the laws of their sequence, are ascertained or tested. As we recognised in the commencement, and have been enabled to see more clearly in the progress of the investigation, the basis of all these logical operations is the law of causation. The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause; some antecedent, on the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent. In the Method of Agreement this is obvious; that method avowedly proceeding on the supposition that we have found the true cause as soon as we have negatived every other. The assertion is equally true of the Method of Difference. That method authorizes us to infer a general law from two instances; one, in which A exists together with a multitude of other circumstances, and B follows; another, in which, A being removed, and all other circumstances remaining the same, B is prevented. What, however, does this prove? It proves that B, in the particular instance, cannot have had any other cause than A; but to conclude from this that A was the cause, or that A will on other occasions be followed by B, is only allowable on the assumption that B must have some cause; that among its antecedents in any single instance in which it occurs, there must be one which has the capacity of producing it at other times. This being admitted, it is seen that in the case in question that antecedent can be no other than A; but, that if it be no other than A it must be A, is not proved, by these instances at least, but taken for granted. There is no need to spend time in proving that the same thing is true of the other Inductive Methods. The universality of the law of causation is assumed in them all.
But is this assumption warranted? Doubtless (it may be said) most phenomena are connected as effects with some antecedent or cause, that is, are never produced unless some assignable fact has preceded them; but the very circumstance that complicated processes of induction are sometimes necessary, shows that cases exist in which this regular order of succession is not apparent to our unaided apprehension. If, then, the processes which bring these cases within the same category with the rest, require that we should assume the universality of the very law which they do not at first sight appear to exemplify, is not this a petitio principii? Can we prove a proposition, by an argument which takes it for granted? And if not so proved, on what evidence does it rest?
For this difficulty, which I have purposely stated in the strongest terms it will admit of, the school of metaphysicians who have long predominated in this country find a ready salvo. They affirm, that the universality of causation is a truth which we cannot help believing; that the belief in it is an instinct, one of the laws of our believing faculty. As the proof of this, they say, and they have nothing else to say, that everybody does believe it; and they number it among the propositions, rather numerous in their catalogue, which may be logically argued against, and perhaps cannot be logically proved, but which are of higher authority than logic, and so essentially inherent in the human mind, that even he who denies them in speculation, shows by his habitual practice that his arguments make no impression upon himself.
Into the merits of this question, considered as one of psychology, it would be foreign to my purpose to enter here: but I must protest against adducing, as evidence of the truth of a fact in external nature, the disposition, however strong or however general, of the human mind to believe it. Belief is not proof, and does not dispense with the necessity of proof. I am aware, that to ask for evidence of a proposition which we are supposed to believe instinctively, is to expose oneself to the charge of rejecting the authority of the human faculties; which of course no one can consistently do, since the human faculties are all which any one has to judge by: and inasmuch as the meaning 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 intellect against the intellect. But this, I apprehend, is a misunderstanding of the nature of evidence. By evidence is not meant anything and everything which produces belief. There are many things which generate belief besides evidence. A mere strong association of ideas often causes a belief so intense as to be unshakeable by experience or argument. Evidence 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 appeal from the human faculties generally, but there is an appeal from one human faculty to another; from the judging faculty, to those which take cognizance of fact, the faculties of sense and consciousness. The legitimacy of this appeal is admitted whenever 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 existence 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 follow; 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 appealed to, might testify one thing, and our reason believe another. But in fact there is no such permanent necessity. 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 innumerable; but no two generations would make out the same catalogue of them. One age or nation believes implicitly what to another seems incredible and inconceivable; one individual has not a vestige of a belief which another deems to be absolutely inherent in humanity. There is not one of these supposed instinctive beliefs 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 commanded 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 associations 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 into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, events may succeed one another at random, without any fixed law; nor can anything in our experience, or in our mental nature, constitute a sufficient, or indeed any, reason for believing that this is nowhere the case.
Were we to suppose (what it is perfectly possible to imagine) that the present order of the universe were brought to an end, and that a chaos succeeded in which there was no fixed succession of events, and the past gave no assurance of the future; if a human being were miraculously kept alive to witness this change, he surely would soon cease to believe in any uniformity, the uniformity itself no longer existing. If this be admitted, the belief in uniformity either is not an instinct, or it is an instinct conquerable, like all other instincts, by acquired knowledge.
But there is no need to speculate on what might be, when we have positive and certain knowledge of what has been. It is not true as a matter of fact, that mankind have always believed that all the successions of events were uniform and according to fixed laws. The Greek philosophers, not even excepting Aristotle, recognised Chance and Spontaneity (τύχη and τὸ αὐτομάτον) as among the agents in nature; in other words, they believed that to that extent there was no guarantee that the past had been similar to itself, or that the future would resemble the past. Even now a full half of the philosophical world, including the very same metaphysicians who contend most for the instinctive character of the belief in uniformity, consider one important class of phenomena, volitions, to be an exception to the uniformity, and not governed by a fixed law.[26]
§ 2. As was observed in a former place,[27] the belief we entertain 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 generalization from many laws of inferior generality. We should never have had the notion of causation (in the philosophical meaning of the term) as a condition of all phenomena, unless many cases of causation, or in other words, many partial uniformities of sequence, had previously become familiar. The more obvious of the particular uniformities suggest, and give evidence of, the general uniformity, and the general uniformity, once established, enables us to prove the remainder of the particular uniformities of which it is made up. As, however, all rigorous processes of induction presuppose the general uniformity, our knowledge of the particular uniformities from which it was first inferred was not, of course, derived from rigorous induction, but from the loose and uncertain mode of induction per enumerationem simplicem: and the law of universal causation, being collected from results so obtained, cannot itself rest on any better foundation.
It would seem, therefore, that induction per enumerationem simplicem not only is not necessarily an illicit logical process, but is in reality the only kind of induction possible; since the more elaborate process depends for its validity on a law, itself obtained in that inartificial mode. Is there not then an inconsistency in contrasting the looseness of one method with the rigidity of another, when that other is indebted to the looser method for its own foundation?
The inconsistency, however, is only apparent. Assuredly, if induction by simple enumeration were an invalid process, no process grounded on it could be valid; just as no reliance could be placed on telescopes, if we could not trust our eyes. But though a valid process, it is a fallible one, and fallible in very different degrees: if therefore we can substitute for the more fallible forms of the process, an operation grounded on the same process in a less fallible form, we shall have effected a very material improvement. And this is what scientific induction does.
A mode of concluding from experience must be pronounced untrustworthy, when subsequent experience refuses to confirm it. According to this criterion, induction by simple enumeration—in other words, generalization of an observed fact from the mere absence of any known instance to the contrary—affords in general a precarious and unsafe ground of assurance; for such generalizations are incessantly discovered, on further experience, to be false. Still, however, it affords some assurance, sufficient, in many cases, for the ordinary guidance of conduct. It would be absurd to say, that the generalizations arrived at by mankind in the outset of their experience, such as these, Food nourishes, Fire burns, Water drowns, were unworthy of reliance.[28] There is a scale of trustworthiness in the results of the original unscientific Induction; and on this diversity (as observed in the fourth chapter of the present book) depend the rules for the improvement of the process. The improvement consists in correcting one of these inartificial generalizations by means of another. As has been already pointed out, this is all that art can do. To test a generalization, by showing that it either follows from, or conflicts with, some stronger induction, some generalization resting on a broader foundation of experience, is the beginning and end of the logic of Induction.
§ 3. Now the precariousness of the method of simple enumeration is in an inverse ratio to the largeness of the generalization. The process is delusive and insufficient, exactly in proportion as the subject-matter of the observation is special and limited in extent. As the sphere widens, this unscientific method becomes less and less liable to mislead; and the most universal class of truths, the law of causation for instance, and the principles of number and of geometry, are duly and satisfactorily proved by that method alone, nor are they susceptible of any other proof.
With respect to the whole class of generalizations of which we have recently treated, the uniformities which depend on causation, the truth of the remark just made follows by obvious inference from the principles laid down in the preceding chapters. When a fact has been observed a certain number of times to be true, and is not in any instance known to be false; if we at once affirm that fact as an universal truth or law of nature, without testing it by any of the four methods of induction, nor deducing it from other known laws, we shall in general err grossly: but we are perfectly justified in affirming it as an empirical law, true within certain limits of time, place, and circumstance, provided the number of coincidences be greater than can with any probability be ascribed to chance. The reason for not extending it beyond those limits is, that the fact of its holding true within them may be a consequence of collocations, which cannot be concluded to exist in one place because they exist in another; or may be dependent on the accidental absence of counteracting agencies, which any variation of time, or the smallest change of circumstances, may possibly bring into play. If we suppose, then, the subject-matter of any generalization to be so widely diffused that there is no time, no place, and no combination of circumstances, but must afford an example either of its truth or of its falsity, and if it be never found otherwise than true, its truth cannot depend on any collocations, unless such as exist at all times and places; nor can it be frustrated by any counteracting agencies, unless by such as never actually occur. It is, therefore, an empirical law coextensive with all human experience; at which point the distinction between empirical laws and laws of nature vanishes, and the proposition takes its place among the most firmly established as well as largest truths accessible to science.
Now, the most extensive in its subject-matter of all generalizations which experience warrants, respecting the sequences and coexistences of phenomena, is the law of causation. It stands at the head of all observed uniformities, in point of universality, and therefore (if the preceding observations are correct) in point of certainty. And if we consider, not what mankind would have been justified in believing in the infancy of their knowledge, but what may rationally be believed in its present more advanced state, we shall find ourselves warranted in considering this fundamental law, though itself obtained by induction from particular laws of causation, as not less certain, but on the contrary, more so, than any of those from which it was drawn. It adds to them as much proof as it receives from them. For there is probably no one even of the best established laws of causation which is not sometimes counteracted, and to which, therefore, apparent exceptions do not present themselves, which would have necessarily and justly shaken the confidence of mankind in the universality of those laws, if inductive processes founded on the universal law had not enabled us to refer those exceptions to the agency of counteracting causes, and thereby reconcile them with the law with which they apparently conflict. Errors, moreover, may have slipped into the statement of any one of the special laws, through inattention to some material circumstance: and instead of the true proposition, another may have been enunciated, false as an universal law, though leading, in all cases hitherto observed, to the same result. To the law of causation, on the contrary, we not only do not know of any exception, but the exceptions which limit or apparently invalidate the special laws, are so far from contradicting the universal one, that they confirm it; since in all cases which are sufficiently open to our observation, we are able to trace the difference of result, either to the absence of a cause which had been present in ordinary cases, or to the presence of one which had been absent.
The law of cause and effect, being thus certain, is capable of imparting its certainty to all other inductive propositions which can be deduced from it; and the narrower inductions may be regarded as receiving their ultimate sanction from that law, since there is no one of them which is not rendered more certain than it was before, when we are able to connect it with that larger induction, and to show that it cannot be denied, consistently with the law that everything which begins to exist has a cause. And hence we are justified in the seeming inconsistency, of holding induction by simple enumeration to be good for proving this general truth, the foundation of scientific induction, and yet refusing to rely on it for any of the narrower inductions. I fully admit that if the law of causation were unknown, generalization in the more obvious cases of uniformity in phenomena would nevertheless be possible, and though in all cases more or less precarious, and in some extremely so, would suffice to constitute a certain measure of probability: but what the amount of this probability might be, we are dispensed from estimating, since it never could amount to the degree of assurance which the proposition acquires, when, by the application to it of the Four Methods, the supposition of its falsity is shown to be inconsistent with the Law of Causation. We are therefore logically entitled, and, by the necessities of scientific Induction, required, to disregard the probabilities derived from the early rude method of generalizing, and to consider no minor generalization as proved except so far as the law of causation confirms it, nor probable except so far as it may reasonably be expected to be so confirmed.
§ 4. The assertion, that our inductive processes assume the law of causation, while the law of causation is itself a case of induction, is a paradox, only on the old theory of reasoning, which supposes the universal truth, or major premise, in a ratiocination, to be the real proof of the particular truths which are ostensibly inferred from it. According to the doctrine maintained in the present treatise,[29] the major premise is not the proof of the conclusion, but is itself proved, along with the conclusion from the same evidence. "All men are mortal" is not the proof that Lord Palmerston is mortal; but our past experience of mortality authorizes us to infer both the general truth and the particular fact, and the one with exactly the same degree of assurance as the other. The mortality of Lord Palmerston is not an inference from the mortality of all men, but from the experience which proves the mortality of all men; and is a correct inference from experience, if that general truth is so too. This relation between our general beliefs and their particular applications holds equally true in the more comprehensive case which we are now discussing. Any new fact of causation inferred by induction, is rightly inferred, if no other objection can be made to the inference than can be made to the general truth that every event has a cause. The utmost certainty which can be given to a conclusion arrived at in the way of inference, stops at this point. When we have ascertained that the particular conclusion must stand or fall with the general uniformity of the laws of nature—that it is liable to no doubt except the doubt whether every event has a cause—we have done all that can be done for it. The strongest assurance we can obtain of any theory respecting the cause of a given phenomenon, is that the phenomenon has either that cause or none.
The latter supposition might have been an admissible one in a very early period of our study of nature. But we have been able to perceive that in the stage which mankind have now reached, the generalization which gives the Law of Universal Causation has grown into a stronger and better induction, one deserving of greater reliance, than any of the subordinate generalizations. We may even, I think, go a step further than this, and regard the certainty of that great induction as not merely comparative, but, for all practical purposes, absolute.
The considerations which, as I apprehend, give, at the present day, to the proof of the law of uniformity of succession as true of all phenomena without exception, this character of completeness and conclusiveness, are the following:—First, that we now know it directly to be true of far the greatest number of phenomena; that there are none of which we know it not to be true, the utmost that can be said being, that of some we cannot positively from direct evidence affirm its truth; while phenomenon after phenomenon, as they become better known to us, are constantly passing from the latter class into the former; and in all cases in which that transition has not yet taken place, the absence of direct proof is accounted for by the rarity or the obscurity of the phenomena, our deficient means of observing them, or the logical difficulties arising from the complication of the circumstances in which they occur; insomuch that, notwithstanding as rigid a dependence on given conditions as exists in the case of any other phenomenon, it was not likely that we should be better acquainted with those conditions than we are. Besides this first class of considerations, there is a second, which still further corroborates the conclusion. Although there are phenomena the production and changes of which elude all our attempts to reduce them universally to any ascertained law; yet in every such case, the phenomenon, or the objects concerned in it, are found in some instances to obey the known laws of nature. The wind, for example, is the type of uncertainty and caprice, yet we find it in some cases obeying with as much constancy as any phenomenon in nature the law of the tendency of fluids to distribute themselves so as to equalize the pressure on every side of each of their particles; as in the case of the trade winds, and the monsoons. Lightning might once have been supposed to obey no laws; but since it has been ascertained to be identical with electricity, we know that the very same phenomenon in some of its manifestations is implicitly obedient to the action of fixed causes. I do not believe that there is now one object or event in all our experience of nature, within the bounds of the solar system at least, 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 manifestations, 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, therefore, 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 phenomena, and not as yet ascertained to have peculiar laws of their own. This great generalization, however, might reasonably have been, as it in fact was, acted on as a probability of the highest order, before there were sufficient grounds for receiving it as a certainty. For, whatever has been found true in innumerable instances, and never found to be false after due examination in any, we are safe in acting on as universal provisionally, until an undoubted exception appears; provided the nature of the case be such that a real exception could scarcely have escaped our 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 phenomena which were uncaused, and which happened to be exactly those which we had hitherto had no sufficient opportunity of studying.
It must, at the same time, be remarked, that the reasons for this reliance do not hold in circumstances unknown to us, and beyond the possible range of our experience. In distant parts of the stellar regions, where the phenomena may be entirely unlike those with which we are acquainted, it would be folly to affirm confidently that this general law prevails, 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 adjacent cases. To extend it further is to make a supposition without evidence, 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.[30]
CHAPTER XXII.
OF UNIFORMITIES OF COEXISTENCE NOT DEPENDENT ON CAUSATION.
§ 1. The order of the occurrence of phenomena in time, is either successive or simultaneous; the uniformities, therefore, which obtain in their occurrence, are either uniformities of succession or of coexistence. Uniformities of succession are all comprehended under the law of causation and its consequences. Every phenomenon has a cause, which it invariably follows; and from this are derived other invariable sequences among the successive stages of the same effect, as well as between the effects resulting from causes which invariably succeed one another.
In the same manner with these derivative uniformities of succession, a great variety of uniformities of coexistence also take their rise. Coordinate effects of the same cause naturally coexist with one another. High water at any point on the earth's surface, and high water at the point diametrically opposite to it, are effects uniformly simultaneous, resulting from the direction in which the combined attractions of the sun and moon act upon the waters of the ocean. An eclipse of the sun to us, and an eclipse of the earth to a spectator situated in the moon, are in like manner phenomena invariably coexistent; and their coexistence can equally be deduced from the laws of their production.
It is an obvious question, therefore, whether all the uniformities of coexistence among phenomena may not be accounted for in this manner. And it cannot be doubted that between phenomena which are themselves effects, the coexistences must necessarily depend on the causes of those phenomena. If they are effects immediately or remotely of the same cause, they cannot coexist except by virtue of some laws or properties of that cause: if they are effects of different causes, they cannot coexist unless it be because their causes coexist; and the uniformity of coexistence, if such there be, between the effects, proves that those particular causes, within the limits of our observation, have uniformly been coexistent.
§ 2. But these same considerations compel us to recognise that there must be one class of coexistences which cannot depend on causation; the coexistences between the ultimate properties of things—those properties which are the causes of all phenomena, but are not themselves caused by any phenomenon, and a cause for which could only be sought by ascending to the origin of all things. Yet among these ultimate properties there are not only coexistences, but uniformities of coexistence. General propositions may be, and are, formed, which assert that whenever certain properties are found, certain others are found along with them. We perceive an object; say, for instance, water. We recognise it to be water, of course by certain of its properties. Having recognised it, we are able to affirm of it innumerable other properties; which we could not do unless it were a general truth, a law or uniformity in nature, that the set of properties by which we identify the substance as water, always have those other properties conjoined with them.
In a former place,[31] it has been explained in some detail what is meant by the Kinds of objects; those classes which differ from one another not by a limited and definite, but by an indefinite and unknown, number of distinctions. To this we have now to add, that every proposition by which anything is asserted of a Kind, affirms an uniformity of coexistence. Since we know nothing of Kinds but their properties, the Kind, to us, is the set of properties by which it is identified, and which must of course be sufficient to distinguish it from every other kind.[32] In affirming anything, therefore, of a Kind, we are affirming something to be uniformly coexistent with the properties by which the kind is recognised; and that is the sole meaning of the assertion.
Among the uniformities of coexistence which exist in nature, may hence be numbered all the properties of Kinds. The whole of these, however, are not independent of causation, but only a portion of them. Some are ultimate properties, others derivative; of some, no cause can be assigned, but others are manifestly dependent on causes. Thus, pure atmospheric air is a Kind, and one of its most unequivocal properties is its gaseous form: this property, however, has for its cause the presence of a certain quantity of latent heat; and if that heat could be taken away (as has been done from so many gases in Faraday's experiments), the gaseous form would doubtless disappear, together with numerous other properties which depend on, or are caused by, that property.
In regard to all substances which are chemical compounds, and which therefore may be regarded as products of the juxtaposition of substances different in Kind from themselves, there is considerable reason to presume that the specific properties of the compound are consequent, as effects, on some of the properties of the elements, though little progress has yet been made in tracing any invariable relation between the latter and the former. Still more strongly will a similar presumption exist, when the object itself, as in the case of organized beings, is no primeval agent, but an effect, which depends on a cause or causes for its very existence. The Kinds therefore which are called in chemistry simple substances, or elementary natural agents, are the only ones, any of whose properties can with certainty be considered ultimate; and of these the ultimate properties are probably much more numerous that we at present recognise, since every successful instance of the resolution of the properties of their compounds into simpler laws, generally leads to the recognition of properties in the elements distinct from any previously known. The resolution of the laws of the heavenly motions, established the previously unknown ultimate property of a mutual attraction between all bodies: the resolution, so far as it has yet proceeded, of the laws of crystallization, of chemical composition, electricity, magnetism, &c., points to various polarities, ultimately inherent in the particles of which bodies are composed; the comparative atomic weights of different kinds of bodies were ascertained by resolving, into more general laws, the uniformities observed in the proportions in which substances combine with one another; and so forth. Thus although every resolution of a complex uniformity into simpler and more elementary laws has an apparent tendency to diminish the number of the ultimate properties, and really does remove many properties from the list; yet, (since the result of this simplifying process is to trace up an ever greater variety of different effects to the same agents,) the further we advance in this direction, the greater number of distinct properties we are forced to recognise in one and the same object: the coexistences of which properties must accordingly be ranked among the ultimate generalities of nature.
§ 3. There are, therefore, only two kinds of propositions which assert uniformity of coexistence between properties. Either the properties depend on causes, or they do not. If they do, the proposition which affirms them to be coexistent is a derivative law of coexistence between effects, and until resolved into the laws of causation on which it depends, is an empirical law, and to be tried by the principles of induction to which such laws are amenable. If, on the other hand, the properties do not depend on causes, but are ultimate properties; then if it be true that they invariably coexist, they must all be ultimate properties of one and the same Kind; and it is of these only that the coexistences can be classed as a peculiar sort of laws of nature.
When we affirm that all crows are black, or that all negroes have woolly hair, we assert an uniformity of coexistence. We assert that the property of blackness, or of having woolly hair, invariably coexists with the properties which, in common language, or in the scientific classification that we adopt, are taken to constitute the class crow, or the class negro. Now, supposing blackness to be an ultimate property of black objects, or woolly hair an ultimate property of the animals which possess it; supposing that these properties are not results of causation, are not connected with antecedent phenomena by any law; then if all crows are black, and all negroes have woolly hair, these must be ultimate properties of the Kind crow, or negro, or of some Kind which includes them. If, on the contrary, blackness or woolly hair be an effect depending on causes, these general propositions are manifestly empirical laws; and all that has already been said respecting that class of generalizations may be applied without modification to these.
Now, we have seen that in the case of all compounds—of all things, in short, except the elementary substances and primary powers of nature—the presumption is, that the properties do really depend upon causes; and it is impossible in any case whatever to be certain that they do not. We therefore should not be safe in claiming for any generalization respecting the coexistence of properties, a degree of certainty to which, if the properties should happen to be the result of causes, it would have no claim. A generalization respecting coexistence, or in other words respecting the properties of Kinds, may be an ultimate truth, but it may, also, be merely a derivative one; and since, if so, it is one of those derivative laws which are neither laws of causation, nor have been resolved into the laws of causation on which they depend, it can possess no higher degree of evidence than belongs to an empirical law.
[29] Book ii. chap. iii.
[24] There was no greater foundation for this than for Newton's celebrated conjecture that the diamond was combustible. He grounded his guess on the very high refracting power of the diamond, comparatively to its density; a peculiarity which had been observed to exist in combustible substances; and on similar grounds he conjectured that water, though not combustible, contained a combustible ingredient. Experiment having subsequently shown that in both instances he guessed right, the prophecy is considered to have done great honour to his scientific sagacity; but it is to this day uncertain whether the guess was, in truth, what there are so many examples of in the history of science, a farsighted anticipation of a law afterwards to be discovered. The progress of science has not hitherto shown ground for believing that there is any real connexion between combustibility and a high refracting power.
[23] For a fuller treatment of the many interesting questions raised by the theory of probabilities, I may now refer to a recent work by Mr. Venn, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, "The Logic of Chance;" one of the most thoughtful and philosophical treatises on any subject connected with Logic and Evidence, which have been produced in this or any other country for many years. Some criticisms contained in it have been very useful to me in revising the corresponding chapters of the present work. In several of Mr. Venn's opinions, however, I do not agree. What these are will be obvious to any reader of Mr. Venn's work who is also a reader of this.
[28] It deserves remark, that these early generalizations did not, like scientific inductions, presuppose causation. What they did presuppose, was uniformity in physical facts. But the observers were as ready to presume uniformity in the coexistences of facts as in the sequences. On the other hand, they never thought of assuming that this uniformity was a principle pervading all nature: their generalizations did not imply that there was uniformity in everything, but only that as much uniformity as existed within their observation, existed also beyond it. The induction, Fire burns, does not require for its validity that all nature should observe uniform laws, but only that there should be uniformity in one particular class of natural phenomena: the effects of fire on the senses and on combustible substances. And uniformity to this extent was not assumed, anterior to the experience, but proved by the experience. The same observed instances which proved the narrower truth, proved as much of the wider one as corresponded to it. It is from losing sight of this fact, and considering the law of causation in its full extent as necessarily presupposed in the very earliest generalizations, that persons have been led into the belief that the law of causation is known à priori, and is not itself a conclusion from experience.
[26] I am happy to be able to quote the following excellent passage from Mr. Baden Powell's Essay on the Inductive Philosophy, in confirmation, both in regard to history and to doctrine, of the statement made in the text. Speaking of the "conviction of the universal and permanent uniformity of nature," Mr. Powell says (pp. 98-100),
[31] Book i. chap. vii.
[27] Supra, book iii. ch. iii. § 1.
[25] Hartley's Observations on Man, vol. i. p. 16. The passage is not in Priestley's curtailed edition.
[32] In some cases, a Kind is sufficiently identified by some one remarkable property: but most commonly several are required; each property considered singly, being a joint property of that and of other Kinds. The colour and brightness of the diamond are common to it with the paste from which false diamonds are made; its octohedral form is common to it with alum, and magnetic iron ore; but the colour and brightness and the form together, identify its Kind; that is, are a mark to us that it is combustible; that when burnt it produces carbonic acid; that it cannot be cut with any known substance; together with many other ascertained properties, and the fact that there exist an indefinite number still unascertained.
[30] 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 similar 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 experience, 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 affording an assurance which experience cannot give, of the universality of those which it does contain. By abstraction M. Taine seems to think that we are able, not merely to analyse that part of nature which we see, and exhibit apart the elements which pervade it, but to distinguish such of them as are elements of the system of nature considered as a whole, not incidents belonging to our limited terrestrial experience. I am not sure that I fully enter into M. Taine's meaning; but I confess I do not see how any mere abstract conception, elicited by our minds from our experience, can be evidence of an objective fact in universal Nature, beyond what the experience itself bears witness of; or how, in the process of interpreting in general language the testimony of experience, the limitations of the testimony itself can be cast off.
§ 4. This conclusion will be confirmed by the consideration of one great deficiency, which precludes the application to the ultimate uniformities of coexistence, of a system of rigorous scientific induction, such as the uniformities in the succession of phenomena have been found to admit of. The basis of such a system is wanting: there is no general axiom, standing in the same relation to the uniformities of coexistence as the law of causation does to those of succession. The Methods of Induction applicable to the ascertainment of causes and effects, are grounded on the principle that everything which has a beginning must have some cause or other; that among the circumstances which actually existed at the time of its commencement, there is certainly some one combination, on which the effect in question is unconditionally consequent, and on the repetition of which it would certainly again recur. But in an inquiry whether some kind (as crow) universally possesses a certain property (as blackness), there is no room for any assumption analogous to this. We have no previous certainty that the property must have something which constantly coexists with it; must have an invariable coexistent, in the same manner as an event must have an invariable antecedent. When we feel pain, we must be in some circumstances under which if exactly repeated we should always feel pain. But when we are conscious of blackness, it does not follow that there is something else present of which blackness is a constant accompaniment. There is, therefore, no room for elimination; no Method of Agreement or Difference, or of Concomitant Variations (which is but a modification either of the Method of Agreement or of the Method of Difference). We cannot conclude that the blackness we see in crows must be an invariable property of crows, merely because there is nothing else present of which it can be an invariable property. We therefore inquire into the truth of a proposition like "All crows are black," under the same disadvantage as if, in our inquiries into causation, we were compelled to let in, as one of the possibilities, that the effect may in that particular instance have arisen without any cause at all.
To overlook this grand distinction was, as it seems to me, the capital error in Bacon's view of inductive philosophy. The principle of elimination, that great logical instrument which he had the immense merit of first bringing into general use, he deemed applicable in the same sense, and in as unqualified a manner, to the investigation of the coexistences, as to that of the successions of phenomena. He seems to have thought that as every event has a cause, or invariable antecedent, so every property of an object has an invariable coexistent, which he called its Form: and the examples he chiefly selected for the application and illustration of his method, were inquiries into such Forms; attempts to determine in what else all those objects resembled, which agreed in some one general property, as hardness or softness, dryness or moistness, heat or coldness. Such inquiries could lead to no result. The objects seldom have any such circumstances in common. They usually agree in the one point inquired into, and in nothing else. A great proportion of the properties which, so far as we can conjecture, are the likeliest to be really ultimate, would seem to be inherently properties of many different Kinds of things, not allied in any other respect. And as for the properties which, being effects of causes, we are able to give some account of, they have generally nothing to do with the ultimate resemblances or diversities in the objects themselves, but depend on some outward circumstances, under the influence of which any objects whatever are capable of manifesting those properties; as is emphatically the case with those favourite subjects of Bacon's scientific inquiries, hotness and coldness; as well as with hardness and softness, solidity and fluidity, and many other conspicuous qualities.
In the absence, then, of any universal law of coexistence, similar to the universal law of causation which regulates sequence, we are thrown back upon the unscientific induction of the ancients, per enumerationem simplicem, ubi non reperitur instantia contradictoria. The reason we have for believing that all crows are black, is simply that we have seen and heard of many black crows, and never one of any other colour. It remains to be considered how far this evidence can reach, and how we are to measure its strength in any given case.
§ 5. It sometimes happens that a mere change in the mode of verbally enunciating a question, though nothing is really added to the meaning expressed, is of itself a considerable step towards its solution. This, I think, happens in the present instance. The degree of certainty of any generalization which rests on no other evidence than the agreement, so far as it goes, of all past observation, is but another phrase for the degree of improbability that an exception, if any existed, could have hitherto remained unobserved. The reason for believing that all crows are black, is measured by the improbability that crows of any other colour should have existed to the present time without our being aware of it. Let us state the question in this last mode, and consider what is implied in the supposition that there may be crows which are not black, and under what conditions we can be justified in regarding this as incredible.
If there really exist crows which are not black, one of two things must be the fact. Either the circumstance of blackness, in all crows hitherto observed, must be, as it were, an accident, not connected with any distinction of Kind; or if it be a property of Kind, the crows which are not black must be a new Kind, a Kind hitherto overlooked, though coming under the same general description by which crows have hitherto been characterized. The first supposition would be proved true if we were to discover casually a white crow among black ones, or if it were found that black crows sometimes turn white. The second would be shown to be the fact if in Australia or Central Africa a species or a race of white or grey crows were found to exist.
§ 6. The former of these suppositions necessarily implies that the colour is an effect of causation. If blackness, in the crows in which it has been observed, be not a property of Kind, but can be present or absent without any difference generally in the properties of the object; then it is not an ultimate fact in the individuals themselves, but is certainly dependent on a cause. There are, no doubt, many properties which vary from individual to individual of the same Kind, even the same infima species, or lowest Kind. Some flowers may be either white or red, without differing in any other respect. But these properties are not ultimate; they depend on causes. So far as the properties of a thing belong to its own nature, and do not arise from some cause extrinsic to it, they are always the same in the same Kind. Take, for instance, all simple substances and elementary powers; the only things of which we are certain that some at least of their properties are really ultimate. Colour is generally esteemed the most variable of all properties: yet we do not find that sulphur is sometimes yellow and sometimes white, or that it varies in colour at all, except so far as colour is the effect of some extrinsic cause, as of the sort of light thrown upon it, the mechanical arrangement of the particles, (as after fusion) &c. We do not find that iron is sometimes fluid and sometimes solid at the same temperature; gold sometimes malleable and sometimes brittle; that hydrogen will sometimes combine with oxygen and sometimes not; or the like. If from simple substances we pass to any of their definite compounds, as water, lime, or sulphuric acid, there is the same constancy in their properties. When properties vary from individual to individual, it is either in the case of miscellaneous aggregations, such as atmospheric air or rock, composed of heterogeneous substances, and not constituting or belonging to any real Kind,[33] or it is in the case of organic beings. In them, indeed, there is variability in a high degree. Animals of the same species and race, human beings of the same age, sex, and country, will be most different, for example, in face and figure. But organized beings (from the extreme complication of the laws by which they are regulated) being more eminently modifiable, that is, liable to be influenced by a greater number and variety of causes, than any other phenomena whatever; having also themselves had a beginning, and therefore a cause; there is reason to believe that none of their properties are ultimate, but all of them derivative, and produced by causation. And the presumption is confirmed, by the fact that the properties which vary from one individual to another, also generally vary more or less at different times in the same individual; which variation, like any other event, supposes a cause, and implies, consequently, that the properties are not independent of causation.
If, therefore, blackness be merely accidental in crows, and capable of varying while the Kind remains the same, its presence or absence is doubtless no ultimate fact, but the effect of some unknown cause: and in that case the universality of the experience that all crows are black is sufficient proof of a common cause, and establishes the generalization as an empirical law. Since there are innumerable instances in the affirmative, and hitherto none at all in the negative, the causes on which the property depends must exist everywhere in the limits of the observations which have been made; and the proposition may be received as universal within those limits, and with the allowable degree of extension to adjacent cases.
§ 7. If, in the second place, the property, in the instances in which it has been observed, is not an effect of causation, it is a property of Kind; and in that case the generalization can only be set aside by the discovery of a new Kind of crow. That, however, a peculiar Kind, not hitherto discovered, should exist in nature, is a supposition so often realized, that it cannot be considered at all improbable. We have nothing to authorize us in attempting to limit the Kinds of things which exist in nature. The only unlikelihood would be that a new Kind should be discovered in localities which there was previously reason to believe had been thoroughly explored; and even this improbability depends on the degree of conspicuousness of the difference between the newly-discovered Kind and all others, since new Kinds of minerals, plants, and even animals, previously overlooked or confounded with known species, are still continually detected in the most frequented situations. On this second ground, therefore, as well as on the first, the observed uniformity of coexistence can only hold good as an empirical law, within the limits not only of actual observation, but of an observation as accurate as the nature of the case required. And hence it is that (as remarked in an early chapter of the present Book) we so often give up generalizations of this class at the first summons. If any credible witness stated that he had seen a white crow, under circumstances which made it not incredible that it should have escaped notice previously, we should give full credence to the statement.
It appears, then, that the uniformities which obtain in the coexistence of phenomena,—those which we have reason to consider as ultimate, no less than those which arise from the laws of causes yet undetected—are entitled to reception only as empirical laws; are not to be presumed true except within the limits of time, place, and circumstance, in which the observations were made, or except in cases strictly adjacent.
§ 8. We have seen in the last chapter that there is a point of generality at which empirical laws become as certain as laws of nature, or rather, at which there is no longer any distinction between empirical laws and laws of nature. As empirical laws approach this point, in other words, as they rise in their degree of generality, they become more certain; their universality may be more strongly relied on. For, in the first place, if they are results of causation (which, even in the class of uniformities treated of in the present chapter, we never can be certain that they are not) the more general they are, the greater is proved to be the space over which the necessary collocations prevail, and within which no causes exist capable of counteracting the unknown causes on which the empirical law depends. To say that anything is an invariable property of some very limited class of objects, is to say that it invariably accompanies some very numerous and complex group of distinguishing properties; which, if causation be at all concerned in the matter, argues a combination of many causes, and therefore a great liability to counteraction; while the comparatively narrow range of the observations renders it impossible to predict to what extent unknown counteracting causes may be distributed throughout nature. But when a generalization has been found to hold good of a very large proportion of all things whatever, it is already proved that nearly all the causes which exist in nature have no power over it; that very few changes in the combination of causes can effect it; since the greater number of possible combinations must have already existed in some one or other of the instances in which it has been found true. If, therefore, any empirical law is a result of causation, the more general it is, the more it may be depended on. And even if it be no result of causation, but an ultimate coexistence, the more general it is, the greater amount of experience it is derived from, and the greater therefore is the probability that if exceptions had existed, some would already have presented themselves.
For these reasons, it requires much more evidence to establish an exception to one of the more general empirical laws than to the more special ones. We should not have any difficulty in believing that there might be a new Kind of crow; or a new kind of bird resembling a crow in the properties hitherto considered distinctive of that Kind. But it would require stronger proof to convince us of the existence of a Kind of crow having properties at variance with any generally recognised universal property of birds; and a still higher degree if the properties conflict with any recognised universal property of animals. And this is conformable to the mode of judgment recommended by the common sense and general practice of mankind, who are more incredulous as to any novelties in nature, according to the degree of generality of the experience which these novelties seem to contradict.
§ 9. Still, however, even these greater generalizations, which embrace comprehensive Kinds, containing under them a great number and variety of infimæ species, are only empirical laws, resting on induction by simple enumeration merely, and not on any process of elimination, a process wholly inapplicable to this sort of case. Such generalizations, therefore, ought to be grounded on an examination of all the infimæ species comprehended in them, and not of a portion only. We cannot conclude (where causation is not concerned), because a proposition is true of a number of things resembling one another only in being animals, that it is therefore true of all animals. If, indeed, anything be true of species which differ more from one another than either differs from a third, (especially if that third species occupies in most of its known properties a position between the two former,) there is some probability that the same thing will also be true of that intermediate species; for it is often, though by no means universally, found, that there is a sort of parallelism in the properties of different Kinds, and that their degree of unlikeness in one respect bears some proportion to their unlikeness in others. We see this parallelism in the properties of the different metals; in those of sulphur, phosphorus, and carbon; of chlorine, iodine, and bromine; in the natural orders of plants and animals, &c. But there are innumerable anomalies and exceptions to this sort of conformity; if indeed the conformity itself be anything but an anomaly and an exception in nature.
Universal propositions, therefore, respecting the properties of superior Kinds, unless grounded on proved or presumed connexion by causation, ought not to be hazarded except after separately examining every known sub-kind included in the larger Kind. And even then such generalizations must be held in readiness to be given up on the occurrence of some new anomaly, which, when the uniformity is not derived from causation, can never, even in the case of the most general of these empirical laws, be considered very improbable. Thus all the universal propositions which it has been attempted to lay down respecting simple substances, or concerning any of the classes which have been formed among simple substances, (and the attempt has been often made,) have, with the progress of experience, either faded into inanity, or been proved to be erroneous; and each Kind of simple substance remains with its own collection of properties apart from the rest, saving a certain parallelism with a few other Kinds, the most similar to itself. In organized beings, indeed, there are abundance of propositions ascertained to be universally true of superior genera, to many of which the discovery hereafter of any exceptions must be regarded as extremely improbable. But these, as already observed, are, we have every reason to believe, properties dependent on causation.
Uniformities of coexistence, then, not only when they are consequences of laws of succession, but also when they are ultimate truths, must be ranked, for the purpose of logic, among empirical laws; and are amenable in every respect to the same rules with those unresolved uniformities which are known to be dependent on causation.
CHAPTER XXIII.
OF APPROXIMATE GENERALIZATIONS, AND PROBABLE EVIDENCE.
§ 1. In our inquiries into the nature of the inductive process, we must not confine our notice to such generalizations from experience as profess to be universally true. There is a class of inductive truths avowedly not universal; in which it is not pretended that the predicate is always true of the subject; but the value of which, as generalizations, is nevertheless extremely great. An important portion of the field of inductive knowledge does not consist of universal truths, but of approximations to such truths; and when a conclusion is said to rest on probable evidence, the premises it is drawn from are usually generalizations of this sort.
As every certain inference respecting a particular case, implies that there is ground for a general proposition, of the form, Every A is B; so does every probable inference suppose that there is ground for a proposition of the form, Most A are B: and the degree of probability of the inference in an average case, will depend on the proportion between the number of instances existing in nature which accord with the generalization, and the number of those which conflict with it.
§ 2. Propositions in the form, Most A are B, are of a very different degree of importance in science, and in the practice of life. To the scientific inquirer they are valuable chiefly as materials for, and steps towards, universal truths. The discovery of these is the proper end of science: its work is not done if it stops at the proposition that a majority of A are B, without circumscribing that majority by some common character, fitted to distinguish them from the minority. Independently of the inferior precision of such imperfect generalizations, and the inferior assurance with which they can be applied to individual cases, it is plain that, compared with exact generalizations, they are almost useless as means of discovering ulterior truths by way of deduction. We may, it is true, by combining the proposition Most A are B, with an universal proposition, Every B is C, arrive at the conclusion that Most A are C. But when a second proposition of the approximate kind is introduced,—or even when there is but one, if that one be the major premise,—nothing can in general be positively concluded. When the major is Most B are D, then, even if the minor be Every A is B, we cannot infer that most A are D, or with any certainty that even some A are D. Though the majority of the class B have the attribute signified by D, the whole of the sub-class A may belong to the minority.[34]
Though so little use can be made, in science, of approximate generalizations, except as a stage on the road to something better, for practical guidance they are often all we have to rely on. Even when science has really determined the universal laws of any phenomenon, not only are those laws generally too much encumbered with conditions to be adapted for every-day use, but the cases which present themselves in life are too complicated, and our decisions require to be taken too rapidly, to admit of waiting till the existence of a phenomenon can be proved by what have been scientifically ascertained to be universal marks of it. To be indecisive and reluctant to act, because we have not evidence of a perfectly conclusive character to act on, is a defect sometimes incident to scientific minds, but which, wherever it exists, renders them unfit for practical emergencies. If we would succeed in action, we must judge by indications which, though they do not generally mislead us, sometimes do; and must make up, as far as possible, for the incomplete conclusiveness of any one indication, by obtaining others to corroborate it. The principles of induction applicable to approximate generalization are therefore a not less important subject of inquiry, than the rules for the investigation of universal truths; and might reasonably be expected to detain us almost as long, were it not that these principles are mere corollaries from those which have been already treated of.
§ 3. There are two sorts of cases in which we are forced to guide ourselves by generalizations of the imperfect form, Most A are B. The first is, when we have no others; when we have not been able to carry our investigation of the laws of the phenomena any farther; as in the following propositions: Most dark-eyed persons have dark hair; Most springs contain mineral substances; Most stratified formations contain fossils. The importance of this class of generalizations is not very great; for, though it frequently happens that we see no reason why that which is true of most individuals of a class is not true of the remainder, nor are able to bring the former under any general description which can distinguish them from the latter, yet if we are willing to be satisfied with propositions of a less degree of generality, and to break down the class A into subclasses, we may generally obtain a collection of propositions exactly true. We do not know why most wood is lighter than water, nor can we point out any general property which discriminates wood that is lighter than water from that which is heavier. But we know exactly what species are the one and what the other. And if we meet with a specimen not conformable to any known species (the only case in which our previous knowledge affords no other guidance than the approximate generalization), we can generally make a specific experiment, which is a surer resource.
It often happens, however, that the proposition, Most A are B, is not the ultimatum of our scientific progress, though the knowledge we possess beyond it cannot conveniently be brought to bear upon the particular instance. In such a case we know well enough what circumstances distinguish the portion of A which has the attribute B from the portion which has it not, but have no means, or have not time, to examine whether those characteristic circumstances exist or not in the individual case. This is the situation we are generally in when the inquiry is of the kind called moral, that is, of the kind which has in view to predict human actions. To enable us to affirm anything universally concerning the actions of classes of human beings, the classification must be grounded on the circumstances of their mental culture and habits, which in an individual case are seldom exactly known; and classes grounded on these distinctions would never precisely accord with those into which mankind are divided for social purposes. All propositions which can be framed respecting the actions of human beings as ordinarily classified, or as classified according to any kind of outward indications, are merely approximate. We can only say, Most persons of a particular age, profession, country, or rank in society, have such and such qualities; or, Most persons when placed in certain circumstances act in such and such a way. Not that we do not often know well enough on what causes the qualities depend, or what sort of persons they are who act in that particular way; but we have seldom the means of knowing whether any individual person has been under the influence of those causes, or is a person of that particular sort. We could replace the approximate generalizations by propositions universally true; but these would hardly ever be capable of being applied to practice. We should be sure of our majors, but we should not be able to get minors to fit: we are forced, therefore, to draw our conclusions from coarser and more fallible indications.
§ 4. Proceeding now to consider, what is to be regarded as sufficient evidence of an approximate generalization; we can have no difficulty in at once recognising that when admissible at all, it is admissible only as an empirical law. Propositions of the form, Every A is B, are not necessarily laws of causation, or ultimate uniformities of coexistence; propositions like Most A are B cannot be so. Propositions hitherto found true in every observed instance, may yet be no necessary consequence of laws of causation, or of ultimate uniformities, and unless they are so, may, for aught we know, be false beyond the limits of actual observation: still more evidently must this be the case with propositions which are only true in a mere majority of the observed instances.
There is some difference, however, in the degree of certainty of the proposition, Most A are B, according as that approximate generalization composes the whole of our knowledge of the subject, or not. Suppose, first, that the former is the case. We know only that most A are B, not why they are so, nor in what respect those which are, differ from those which are not. How then did we learn that most A are B? Precisely in the manner in which we should have learnt, had such happened to be the fact, that all A are B. We collected a number of instances sufficient to eliminate chance, and having done so, compared the number of instances in the affirmative with the number in the negative. The result, like other unresolved derivative laws, can be relied on solely within the limits not only of place and time, but also of circumstance, under which its truth has been actually observed; for as we are supposed to be ignorant of the causes which make the proposition true, we cannot tell in what manner any new circumstance might perhaps affect it. The proposition, Most judges are inaccessible to bribes, would be found true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, North Americans, and so forth; but if on this evidence alone we extended the assertion to Orientals, we should step beyond the limits, not only of place but of circumstance, within which the fact had been observed, and should let in possibilities of the absence of the determining causes, or the presence of counteracting ones, which might be fatal to the approximate generalization.
In the case where the approximate proposition is not the ultimatum of our scientific knowledge, but only the most available form of it for practical guidance; where we know, not only that most A have the attribute B, but also the causes of B, or some properties by which the portion of A which has that attribute is distinguished from the portion which has it not; we are rather more favourably situated than in the preceding case. For we have now a double mode of ascertaining whether it be true that most A are B; the direct mode, as before, and an indirect one, that of examining whether the proposition admits of being deduced from the known cause, or from any known criterion, of B. Let the question, for example, be whether most Scotchmen can read? We may not have observed, or received the testimony of others respecting, a sufficient number and variety of Scotchmen to ascertain this fact; but when we consider that the cause of being able to read is the having been taught it, another mode of determining the question presents itself, namely, by inquiring whether most Scotchmen have been sent to schools where reading is effectually taught. Of these two modes, sometimes one and sometimes the other is the more available. In some cases, the frequency of the effect is the more accessible to that extensive and varied observation which is indispensable to the establishment of an empirical law; at other times, the frequency of the causes, or of some collateral indications. It commonly happens that neither is susceptible of so satisfactory an induction as could be desired, and that the grounds on which the conclusion is received are compounded of both. Thus a person may believe that most Scotchmen can read, because, so far as his information extends, most Scotchmen have been sent to school, and most Scotch schools teach reading effectually; and also because most of the Scotchmen whom he has known or heard of, could read; though neither of these two sets of observations may by itself fulfil the necessary conditions of extent and variety.
Although the approximate generalization may in most cases be indispensable for our guidance, even when we know the cause, or some certain mark, of the attribute predicated; it needs hardly be observed that we may always replace the uncertain indication by a certain one, in any case in which we can actually recognise the existence of the cause or mark. For example, an assertion is made by a witness, and the question is, whether to believe it. If we do not look to any of the individual circumstances of the case, we have nothing to direct us but the approximate generalization, that truth is more common than falsehood, or, in other words, that most persons, on most occasions, speak truth. But if we consider in what circumstances the cases where truth is spoken differ from those in which it is not, we find, for instance, the following: the witness's being an honest person or not; his being an accurate observer or not; his having an interest to serve in the matter or not. Now, not only may we be able to obtain other approximate generalizations respecting the degree of frequency of these various possibilities, but we may know which of them is positively realized in the individual case. That the witness has or has not an interest to serve, we perhaps know directly; and the other two points indirectly, by means of marks; as, for example, from his conduct on some former occasion; or from his reputation, which, though a very uncertain mark, affords an approximate generalization (as, for instance, Most persons who are believed to be honest by those with whom they have had frequent dealings, are really so) which approaches nearer to an universal truth than the approximate general proposition with which we set out, viz. Most persons on most occasions speak truth.
As it seems unnecessary to dwell further on the question of the evidence of approximate generalizations, we shall proceed to a not less important topic, that of the cautions to be observed in arguing from these incompletely universal propositions to particular cases.
§ 5. So far as regards the direct application of an approximate generalization to an individual instance, this question presents no difficulty. If the proposition, Most A are B, has been established, by a sufficient induction, as an empirical law, we may conclude that any particular A is B with a probability proportioned to the preponderance of the number of affirmative instances over the number of exceptions. If it has been found practicable to attain numerical precision in the data, a corresponding degree of precision may be given to the evaluation of the chances of error in the conclusion. If it can be established as an empirical law that nine out of every ten A are B, there will be one chance in ten of error in assuming that any A, not individually known to us, is a B: but this of course holds only within the limits of time, place, and circumstance, embraced in the observations, and therefore cannot be counted on for any sub-class or variety of A (or for A in any set of external circumstances) which were not included in the average. It must be added, that we can guide ourselves by the proposition, Nine out of every ten A are B, only in cases of which we know nothing except that they fall within the class A. For if we know, of any particular instance i, not only that it falls under A, but to what species or variety of A it belongs, we shall generally err in applying to i the average struck for the whole genus, from which the average corresponding to that species alone would, in all probability, materially differ. And so if i, instead of being a particular sort of instance, is an instance known to be under the influence of a particular set of circumstances. The presumption drawn from the numerical proportions in the whole genus would probably, in such a case, only mislead. A general average should only be applied to cases which are neither known, nor can be presumed, to be other than average cases. Such averages, therefore, are commonly of little use for the practical guidance of any affairs but those which concern large numbers. Tables of the chances of life are useful to insurance offices, but they go a very little way towards informing any one of the chances of his own life, or any other life in which he is interested, since almost every life is either better or worse than the average. Such averages can only be considered as supplying the first term in a series of approximations; the subsequent terms proceeding on an appreciation of the circumstances belonging to the particular case.
§ 6. From the application of a single approximate generalization to individual cases, we proceed to the application of two or more of them together to the same case.
When a judgment applied to an individual instance is grounded on two approximate generalizations taken in conjunction, the propositions may co-operate towards the result in two different ways. In the one, each proposition is separately applicable to the case in hand, and our object in combining them is to give to the conclusion in that particular case the double probability arising from the two propositions separately. This may be called joining two probabilities by way of Addition; and the result is a probability greater than either. The other mode is, when only one of the propositions is directly applicable to the case, the second being only applicable to it by virtue of the application of the first. This is joining two probabilities by way of Ratiocination or Deduction; the result of which is a less probability than either. The type of the first argument is, Most A are B; most C are B; this thing is both an A and a C; therefore it is probably a B. The type of the second is, Most A are B; most C are A; this is a C; therefore it is probably an A, therefore it is probably a B. The first is exemplified when we prove a fact by the testimony of two unconnected witnesses; the second, when we adduce only the testimony of one witness that he has heard the thing asserted by another. Or again, in the first mode it may be argued that the accused committed the crime, because he concealed himself, and because his clothes were stained with blood; in the second, that he committed it because he washed or destroyed his clothes, which is supposed to render it probable that they were stained with blood. Instead of only two links, as in these instances, we may suppose chains of any length. A chain of the former kind was termed by Bentham[35] a self-corroborative chain of evidence; the second, a self-infirmative chain.
When approximate generalizations are joined by way of addition, we may deduce from the theory of probabilities laid down in a former chapter, in what manner each of them adds to the probability of a conclusion which has the warrant of them all.
In the early editions of this treatise, the joint probability arising from the sum of two independent probabilities was estimated in the following manner. If, on an average, two of every three As are Bs, and three of every four Cs are Bs, the probability that something which is both an A and a C is a B, will be more than two in three, or than three in four. Of every twelve things which are As, all except four are Bs by the supposition; and if the whole twelve, and consequently those four, have the characters of C likewise, three of these will be Bs on that ground. Therefore, out of twelve which are both As and Cs, eleven are Bs. To state the argument in another way; a thing which is both an A and a C, but which is not a B, is found in only one of three sections of the class A, and in only one of four sections of the class C; but this fourth of C being spread over the whole of A indiscriminately, only one-third part of it (or one-twelfth of the whole number) belongs to the third section of A; therefore a thing which is not a B occurs only once, among twelve things which are both As and Cs. The argument would in the language of the doctrine of chances, be thus expressed: the chance that an A is not a B is 1/3, the chance that a C is not a B is 1/4; hence if the thing be both an A and a C, the chance is 1/3 of 1/4 = 1/12.
It has, however, been pointed out to me by a mathematical friend, that in this statement the evaluation of the chances is erroneous. The correct mode of setting out the possibilities is as follows. If the thing (let us call it T) which is both an A and a C, is a B, something is true which is only true twice in every thrice, and something else which is only true thrice in every four times. The first fact being true eight times in twelve, and the second being true six times in every eight, and consequently six times in those eight; both facts will be true only six times in twelve. On the other hand if T, although it is both an A and a C, is not a B, something is true which is only true once in every thrice, and something else which is only true once in every four times. The former being true four times out of twelve, and the latter once in every four, and therefore once in those four; both are only true in one case out of twelve. So that T is a B six times in twelve, and T is not a B, only once: making the comparative probabilities, not eleven to one, as I had previously made them, but six to one.
It may be asked, what happens in the remaining cases? since in this calculation seven out of twelve cases seem to have exhausted the possibilities. If T is a B in only six cases of every twelve, and a not-B in only one, what is it in the other five? The only supposition remaining for those cases is that it is neither a B nor not a B, which is impossible. But this impossibility merely proves that the state of things supposed in the hypothesis does not exist in those cases. They are cases that do not furnish anything which is both an A and a C.
To make this intelligible, we will substitute for our symbols a concrete case. Let there be two witnesses, M and N, whose probabilities of veracity correspond with the ratios of the preceding example: M speaks truth twice in every thrice, N thrice in every four times. The question is, what is the probability that a statement, in which they both concur, will be true. The cases may be classed as follows. Both the witnesses will speak truly six in every twelve times; both falsely once in twelve times. Therefore, if they both agree in an assertion, it will be true six times, for once that it will be false. What happens in the remaining cases is here evident; there will be five cases in every twelve in which the witnesses will not agree. M will speak truth and N falsehood in two cases of every twelve; N will speak truth and M falsehood in three cases, making in all five. In these cases, however, the witnesses will not agree in their testimony. But disagreement between them is excluded by the supposition. There are, therefore, only seven cases which are within the conditions of the hypothesis; of which seven, veracity exists in six, and falsehood in one. Resuming our former symbols, in five cases out of twelve T is not both an A and a C, but an A only, or a C only. The cases in which it is both are only seven, in six of which it is a B, in one not a B, making the chance six to one, or 6/7 and 1/7 respectively.
In this correct, as in the former incorrect computation, it is of course presupposed that the probabilities arising from A and C are independent of each other. There must not be any such connexion between A and C, that when a thing belongs to the one class it will therefore belong to the other, or even have a greater chance of doing so. Otherwise the not-Bs which are Cs may be, most or even all of them, identical with the not-Bs which are As; in which last case the probability arising from A and C together will be no greater than that arising from A alone.
When approximate generalizations are joined together in the other mode, that of deduction, the degree of probability of the inference, instead of increasing, diminishes at each step. From two such premises as Most A are B, Most B are C, we cannot with certainty conclude that even a single A is C; for the whole of the portion of A which in any way falls under B, may perhaps be comprised in the exceptional part of it. Still, the two propositions in question afford an appreciable probability that any given A is C, provided the average on which the second proposition is grounded, was taken fairly with reference to the first; provided the proposition, Most B are C, was arrived at in a manner leaving no suspicion that the probability arising from it is otherwise than fairly distributed over the section of B which belongs to A. For though the instances which are A may be all in the minority, they may, also, be all in the majority; and the one possibility is to be set against the other. On the whole, the probability arising from the two propositions taken together, will be correctly measured by the probability arising from the one, abated in the ratio of that arising from the other. If nine out of ten Swedes have light hair, and eight out of nine inhabitants of Stockholm are Swedes, the probability arising from these two propositions, that any given inhabitant of Stockholm is light-haired, will amount to eight in ten; though it is rigorously possible that the whole Swedish population of Stockholm might belong to that tenth section of the people of Sweden who are an exception to the rest.
If the premises are known to be true not of a bare majority, but of nearly the whole, of their respective subjects, we may go on joining one such proposition to another for several steps, before we reach a conclusion not presumably true even of a majority. The error of the conclusion will amount to the aggregate of the errors of all the premises. Let the proposition, Most A are B, be true of nine in ten; Most B are C, of eight in nine: then not only will one A in ten not be C, because not B, but even of the nine-tenths which are B, only eight-ninths will be C: that is, the cases of A which are C will be only 8/9 of 9/10, or four-fifths. Let us now add Most C are D, and suppose this to be true of seven cases out of eight; the proportion of A which is D will be only 7/8 of 8/9 of 9/10, or 7/10. Thus the probability progressively dwindles. The experience, however, on which our approximate generalizations are grounded, has so rarely been subjected to, or admits of, accurate numerical estimation, that we cannot in general apply any measurement to the diminution of probability which takes place at each illation; but must be content with remembering that it does diminish at every step, and that unless the premises approach very nearly indeed to being universally true, the conclusion after a very few steps is worth nothing. A hearsay of a hearsay, or an argument from presumptive evidence depending not on immediate marks but on marks of marks, is worthless at a very few removes from the first stage.
§ 7. There are, however, two cases in which reasonings depending on approximate generalizations may be carried to any length we please with as much assurance, and are as strictly scientific, as if they were composed of universal laws of nature. But these cases are exceptions of the sort which are currently said to prove the rule. The approximate generalizations are as suitable, in the cases in question, for purposes of ratiocination, as if they were complete generalizations, because they are capable of being transformed into complete generalizations exactly equivalent.
First: If the approximate generalization is of the class in which our reason for stopping at the approximation is not the impossibility, but only the inconvenience, of going further; if we are cognizant of the character which distinguishes the cases that accord with the generalization from those which are exceptions to it; we may then substitute for the approximate proposition, an universal proposition with a proviso. The proposition, Most persons who have uncontrolled power employ it ill, is a generalization of this class, and may be transformed into the following:—All persons who have uncontrolled power employ it ill, provided they are not persons of unusual strength of judgment and rectitude of purpose. The proposition, carrying the hypothesis or proviso with it, may then be dealt with no longer as an approximate, but as an universal proposition; and to whatever number of steps the reasoning may reach, the hypothesis, being carried forward to the conclusion, will exactly indicate how far that conclusion is from being applicable universally. If in the course of the argument other approximate generalizations are introduced, each of them being in like manner expressed as an universal proposition with a condition annexed, the sum of all the conditions will appear at the end as the sum of all the errors which affect the conclusion. Thus, to the proposition last cited, let us add the following:—All absolute monarchs have uncontrolled power, unless their position is such that they need the active support of their subjects (as was the case with Queen Elizabeth, Frederick of Prussia, and others). Combining these two propositions, we can deduce from them an universal conclusion, which will be subject to both the hypotheses in the premises; All absolute monarchs employ their power ill, unless their position makes them need the active support of their subjects, or unless they are persons of unusual strength of judgment and rectitude of purpose. It is of no consequence how rapidly the errors in our premises accumulate, if we are able in this manner to record each error, and keep an account of the aggregate as it swells up.
Secondly: there is a case in which approximate propositions, even without our taking note of the conditions under which they are not true of individual cases, are yet, for the purposes of science, universal ones; namely, in the inquiries which relate to the properties not of individuals, but of multitudes. The principal of these is the science of politics, or of human society. This science is principally concerned with the actions not of solitary individuals, but of masses; with the fortunes not of single persons, but of communities.
For the statesman, therefore, it is generally enough to know that most persons act or are acted upon in a particular way; since his speculations and his practical arrangements refer almost exclusively to cases in which the whole community, or some large portion of it, is acted upon at once, and in which, therefore, what is done or felt by most persons determines the result produced by or upon the body at large. He can get on well enough with approximate generalizations on human nature, since what is true approximately of all individuals is true absolutely of all masses. And even when the operations of individual men have a part to play in his deductions, as when he is reasoning of kings, or other single rulers, still, as he is providing for indefinite duration, involving an indefinite succession of such individuals, he must in general both reason and act as if what is true of most persons were true of all.
The two kinds of considerations above adduced are a sufficient refutation of the popular error, that speculations on society and government, as resting on merely probable evidence, must be inferior in certainty and scientific accuracy to the conclusions of what are called the exact sciences, and less to be relied on in practice. There are reasons enough why the moral sciences must remain inferior to at least the more perfect of the physical: why the laws of their more complicated phenomena cannot be so completely deciphered, nor the phenomena predicted with the same degree of assurance. But though we cannot attain to so many truths, there is no reason that those we can attain should deserve less reliance, or have less of a scientific character. Of this topic, however, I shall treat more systematically in the concluding Book, to which place any further consideration of it must be deferred.
CHAPTER XXIV.
OF THE REMAINING LAWS OF NATURE.
§ 1. In the First Book, we found that all the assertions which can be conveyed by language, express some one or more of five different things: Existence; Order in Place; Order in Time; Causation; and Resemblance.[36] Of these, Causation, in our view of the subject, not being fundamentally different from Order in Time, the five species of possible assertions are reduced to four. The propositions which affirm Order in Time, in either of its two modes, Coexistence and Succession, have formed, thus far, the subject of the present Book. And we have now concluded the exposition, so far as it falls within the limits assigned to this work, of the nature of the evidence on which these propositions rest, and the processes of investigation by which they are ascertained and proved. There remain three classes of facts: Existence, Order in Place, and Resemblance; in regard to which the same questions are now to be resolved.
Regarding the first of these, very little needs be said. Existence in general, is a subject not for our science, but for metaphysics. To determine what things can be recognised as really existing, independently of our own sensible or other impressions, and in what meaning the term is, in that case, predicated of them, belongs to the consideration of "Things in themselves," from which, throughout this work, we have as much as possible kept aloof. Existence, so far as Logic is concerned about it, has reference only to phenomena; to actual, or possible, states of external or internal consciousness, in ourselves or others. Feelings of sensitive beings, or possibilities of having such feelings, are the only things the existence of which can be a subject of logical induction, because the only things of which the existence in individual cases can be a subject of experience.
It is true that a thing is said by us to exist, even when it is absent, and therefore is not and cannot be perceived. But even then, its existence is to us only another word for our conviction that we should perceive it on a certain supposition; namely, if we were in the needful circumstances of time and place, and endowed with the needful perfection of organs. My belief that the Emperor of China exists, is simply my belief that if I were transported to the imperial palace or some other locality in Pekin, I should see him. My belief that Julius Cæsar existed, is my belief that I should have seen him if I had been present in the field of Pharsalia, or in the senate-house at Rome. When I believe that stars exist beyond the utmost range of my vision, though assisted by the most powerful telescopes yet invented, my belief, philosophically expressed, is, that with still better telescopes, if such existed, I could see them, or that they may be perceived by beings less remote from them in space, or whose capacities of perception are superior to mine.
The existence, therefore, of a phenomenon, is but another word for its being perceived, or for the inferred possibility of perceiving it. When the phenomenon is within the range of present observation, by present observation we assure ourselves of its existence; when it is beyond that range, and is therefore said to be absent, we infer its existence from marks or evidences. But what can these evidences be? Other phenomena; ascertained by induction to be connected with the given phenomenon, either in the way of succession or of coexistence. The simple existence, therefore, of an individual phenomenon, when not directly perceived, is inferred from some inductive law of succession or coexistence: and is consequently not amenable to any peculiar inductive principles. We prove the existence of a thing, by proving that it is connected by succession or coexistence with some known thing.
With respect to general propositions of this class, that is, which affirm the bare fact of existence, they have a peculiarity which renders the logical treatment of them a very easy matter; they are generalizations which are sufficiently proved by a single instance. That ghosts, or unicorns, or sea-serpents exist, would be fully established if it could be ascertained positively that such things had been even once seen. Whatever has once happened, is capable of happening again; the only question relates to the conditions under which it happens.
So far, therefore, as relates to simple existence, the Inductive Logic has no knots to untie. And we may proceed to the remaining two of the great classes into which facts have been divided; Resemblance, and Order in Space.
§ 2. Resemblance and its opposite, except in the case in which they assume the names of Equality and Inequality, are seldom regarded as subjects of science; they are supposed to be perceived by simple apprehension; by merely applying our senses or directing our attention to the two objects at once, or in immediate succession. And this simultaneous, or virtually simultaneous, application of our faculties to the two things which are to be compared, does necessarily constitute the ultimate appeal, wherever such application is practicable. But, in most cases, it is not practicable: the objects cannot be brought so close together that the feeling of their resemblance (at least a complete feeling of it) directly arises in the mind. We can only compare each of them with some third object, capable of being transported from one to the other. And besides, even when the objects can be brought into immediate juxtaposition, their resemblance or difference is but imperfectly known to us, unless we have compared them minutely, part by part. Until this has been done, things in reality very dissimilar often appear undistinguishably alike. Two lines of very unequal length will appear about equal when lying in different directions; but place them parallel, with their farther extremities even, and if we look at the nearer extremities, their inequality becomes a matter of direct perception.
To ascertain whether, and in what, two phenomena resemble or differ, is not always, therefore, so easy a thing as it might at first appear. When the two cannot be brought into juxtaposition, or not so that the observer is able to compare their several parts in detail, he must employ the indirect means of reasoning and general propositions. When we cannot bring two straight lines together, to determine whether they are equal, we do it by the physical aid of a foot rule applied first to one and then to the other, and the logical aid of the general proposition or formula, "Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another." The comparison of two things through the intervention of a third thing, when their direct comparison is impossible, is the appropriate scientific process for ascertaining resemblances and dissimilarities, and is the sum total of what Logic has to teach on the subject.
An undue extension of this remark induced Locke to consider reasoning itself as nothing but the comparison of two ideas through the medium of a third, and knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas: doctrines which the Condillac school blindly adopted, without the qualifications and distinctions with which they were studiously guarded by their illustrious author. Where, indeed, the agreement or disagreement (otherwise called resemblance or dissimilarity) of any two things is the very matter to be determined, as is the case particularly in the sciences of quantity and extension; there, the process by which a solution, if not attainable by direct perception, must be indirectly sought, consists in comparing these two things through the medium of a third. But this is far from being true of all inquiries. The knowledge that bodies fall to the ground is not a perception of agreement or disagreement, but of a series of physical occurrences, a succession of sensations. Locke's definitions of knowledge and of reasoning required to be limited to our knowledge of, and reasoning about, resemblances. Nor, even when thus restricted, are the propositions strictly correct; since the comparison is not made, as he represents, between the ideas of the two phenomena, but between the phenomena themselves. This mistake has been pointed out in an earlier part of our inquiry,[37] and we traced it to an imperfect conception of what takes place in mathematics, where very often the comparison is really made between the ideas, without any appeal to the outward senses; only, however, because in mathematics a comparison of the ideas is strictly equivalent to a comparison of the phenomena themselves. Where, as in the case of numbers, lines, and figures, our idea of an object is a complete picture of the object, so far as respects the matter in hand; we can, of course, learn from the picture, whatever could be learnt from the object itself by mere contemplation of it as it exists at the particular instant when the picture is taken. No mere contemplation of gunpowder would ever teach us that a spark would make it explode, nor, consequently, would the contemplation of the idea of gunpowder do so: but the mere contemplation of a straight line shows that it cannot inclose a space: accordingly the contemplation of the idea of it will show the same. What takes place in mathematics is thus no argument that the comparison is between the ideas only. It is always, either indirectly or directly, a comparison of the phenomena.
In cases in which we cannot bring the phenomena to the test of direct inspection at all, or not in a manner sufficiently precise, but must judge of their resemblance by inference from other resemblances or dissimilarities more accessible to observation, we of course require, as in all cases of ratiocination, generalizations or formulæ applicable to the subject. We must reason from laws of nature; from the uniformities which are observable in the fact of likeness or unlikeness.
§ 3. Of these laws or uniformities, the most comprehensive are those supplied by mathematics; the axioms relating to equality, inequality, and proportionality, and the various theorems thereon founded. And these are the only Laws of Resemblance which require to be, or which can be, treated apart. It is true there are innumerable other theorems which affirm resemblances among phenomena; as that the angle of the reflection of light is equal to its angle of incidence (equality being merely exact resemblance in magnitude). Again, that the heavenly bodies describe equal areas in equal times; and that their periods of revolution are proportional (another species of resemblance) to the sesquiplicate powers of their distances from the centre of force. These and similar propositions affirm resemblances, of the same nature with those asserted in the theorems of mathematics; but the distinction is, that the propositions of mathematics are true of all phenomena whatever, or at least without distinction of origin; while the truths in question are affirmed only of special phenomena, which originate in a certain way; and the equalities, proportionalities, or other resemblances, which exist between such phenomena, must necessarily be either derived from, or identical with, the law of their origin—the law of causation on which they depend. The equality of the areas described in equal times by the planets, is derived from the laws of the causes; and, until its derivation was shown, it was an empirical law. The equality of the angles of reflexion and incidence is identical with the law of the cause; for the cause is the incidence of a ray of light upon a reflecting surface, and the equality in question is the very law according to which that cause produces its effects. This class, therefore, of the uniformities of resemblance between phenomena, are inseparable, in fact and in thought, from the laws of the production of those phenomena: and the principles of induction applicable to them are no other than those of which we have treated in the preceding chapters of this Book.
It is otherwise with the truths of mathematics. The laws of equality and inequality between spaces, or between numbers, have no connexion with laws of causation. That the angle of reflexion is equal to the angle of incidence, is a statement of the mode of action of a particular cause; but that when two straight lines intersect each other the opposite angles are equal, is true of all such lines and angles, by whatever cause produced. That the squares of the periodic times of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their distances from the sun, is an uniformity derived from the laws of the causes (or forces) which produce the planetary motions; but that the square of any number is four times the square of half the number, is true independently of any cause. The only laws of resemblance, therefore, which we are called upon to consider independently of causation, belong to the province of mathematics.
§ 4. The same thing is evident with respect to the only one remaining of our five categories, Order in Place. The order in place, of the effects of a cause, is (like everything else belonging to the effects) a consequence of the laws of that cause. The order in place, or, as we have termed it, the collocation, of the primeval causes, is (as well as their resemblance) in each instance an ultimate fact, in which no laws or uniformities are traceable. The only remaining general propositions respecting order in place, and the only ones which have nothing to do with causation, are some of the truths of geometry; laws through which we are able, from the order in place of certain points, lines, or spaces, to infer the order in place of others which are connected with the former in some known mode; quite independently of the particular nature of those points, lines, or spaces, in any other respect than position or magnitude, as well as independently of the physical cause from which in any particular case they happen to derive their origin.
It thus appears that mathematics is the only department of science into the methods of which it still remains to inquire. And there is the less necessity that this inquiry should occupy us long, as we have already, in the Second Book, made considerable progress in it. We there remarked, that the directly inductive truths of mathematics are few in number; consisting of the axioms, together with certain propositions concerning existence, tacitly involved in most of the so-called definitions. And we gave what appeared conclusive reasons for affirming that these original premises, from which the remaining truths of the science are deduced, are, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary, results of observation and experience; founded, in short, on the evidence of the senses. That things equal to the same thing are equal to one another, and that two straight lines which have once intersected one another continue to diverge, are inductive truths; resting, indeed, like the law of universal causation, only on induction per enumerationem simplicem; on the fact that they have been perpetually perceived to be true, and never once found to be false. But, as we have seen in a recent chapter that this evidence, in the case of a law so completely universal as the law of causation, amounts to the fullest proof, so is this even more evidently true of the general propositions to which we are now adverting; because, as a perception of their truth in any individual case whatever, requires only the simple act of looking at the objects in a proper position, there never could have been in their case (what, for a long period, there were in the case of the law of causation) instances which were apparently, though not really, exceptions to them. Their infallible truth was recognised from the very dawn of speculation; and as their extreme familiarity made it impossible for the mind to conceive the objects under any other law, they were, and still are, generally considered as truths recognised by their own evidence, or by instinct.
§ 5. There is something which seems to require explanation, in the fact that the immense multitude of truths (a multitude still as far from being exhausted as ever) comprised in the mathematical sciences, can be elicited from so small a number of elementary laws. One sees not, at first, how it is that there can be room for such an infinite variety of true propositions, on subjects apparently so limited.
To begin with the science of number. The elementary or ultimate truths of this science are the common axioms concerning equality, namely, "Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another," and "Equals added to equals make equal sums," (no other axioms are required,[38]) together with the definitions of the various numbers. Like other so-called definitions, these are composed of two things, the explanation of a name, and the assertion of a fact: of which the latter alone can form a first principle or premise of a science. The fact asserted in the definition of a number is a physical fact. Each of the numbers two, three, four, &c., denotes physical phenomena, and connotes a physical property of those phenomena. Two, for instance, denotes all pairs of things, and twelve all dozens of things, connoting what makes them pairs, or dozens; and that which makes them so is something physical; since it cannot be denied that two apples are physically distinguishable from three apples, two horses from one horse, and so forth: that they are a different visible and tangible phenomenon. I am not undertaking to say what the difference is; it is enough that there is a difference of which the senses can take cognizance. And although a hundred and two horses are not so easily distinguished from a hundred and three, as two horses are from three—though in most positions the senses do not perceive any difference—yet they may be so placed that a difference will be perceptible, or else we should never have distinguished them, and given them different names. Weight is confessedly a physical property of things; yet small differences between great weights are as imperceptible to the senses in most situations, as small differences between great numbers; and are only put in evidence by placing the two objects in a peculiar position—namely, in the opposite scales of a delicate balance.
What, then, is that which is connoted by a name of number? Of course some property belonging to the agglomeration of things which we call by the name; and that property is, the characteristic manner in which the agglomeration is made up of, and may be separated into, parts. I will endeavour to make this more intelligible by a few explanations.
When we call a collection of objects two, three, or four, they are not two, three, or four in the abstract; they are two, three, or four things of some particular kind; pebbles, horses, inches, pounds weight. What the name of number connotes is, the manner in which single objects of the given kind must be put together, in order to produce that particular aggregate. If the aggregate be of pebbles, and we call it two, the name implies that, to compose the aggregate, one pebble must be joined to one pebble. If we call it three, one and one and one pebble must be brought together to produce it, or else one pebble must be joined to an aggregate of the kind called two, already existing. The aggregate which we call four, has a still greater number of characteristic modes of formation. One and one and one and one pebble may be brought together; or two aggregates of the kind called two may be united; or one pebble may be added to an aggregate of the kind called three. Every succeeding number in the ascending series, may be formed by the junction of smaller numbers in a progressively greater variety of ways. Even limiting the parts to two, the number may be formed, and consequently may be divided, in as many different ways as there are numbers smaller than itself; and, if we admit of threes, fours, &c., in a still greater variety. Other modes of arriving at the same aggregate present themselves, not by the union of smaller, but by the dismemberment of larger aggregates. Thus, three pebbles may be formed by taking away one pebble from an aggregate of four; two pebbles, by an equal division of a similar aggregate; and so on.
Every arithmetical proposition; every statement of the result of an arithmetical operation; is a statement of one of the modes of formation of a given number. It affirms that a certain aggregate might have been formed by putting together certain other aggregates, or by withdrawing certain portions of some aggregate; and that, by consequence, we might reproduce those aggregates from it, by reversing the process.
Thus, when we say that the cube of 12 is 1728, what we affirm is this: that if, having a sufficient number of pebbles or of any other objects, we put them together into the particular sort of parcels or aggregates called twelves; and put together these twelves again into similar collections; and, finally, make up twelve of these largest parcels; the aggregate thus formed will be such a one as we call 1728; namely, that which (to take the most familiar of its modes of formation) may be made by joining the parcel called a thousand pebbles, the parcel called seven hundred pebbles, the parcel called twenty pebbles, and the parcel called eight pebbles.
The converse proposition, that the cube root of 1728 is 12, asserts that this large aggregate may again be decomposed into the twelve twelves of twelves of pebbles which it consists of.
The modes of formation of any number are innumerable; but when we know one mode of formation of each, all the rest may be determined deductively. If we know that a is formed from b and c, b from a and e, c from d and f, and so forth, until we have included all the numbers of any scale we choose to select, (taking care that for each number the mode of formation be really a distinct one, not bringing us round again to the former numbers, but introducing a new number,) we have a set of propositions from which we may reason to all the other modes of formation of those numbers from one another. Having established a chain of inductive truths connecting together all the numbers of the scale, we can ascertain the formation of any one of those numbers from any other by merely travelling from one to the other along the chain. Suppose that we know only the following modes of formation: 6 = 4 + 2, 4 = 7 - 3, 7 = 5 + 2, 5 = 9 - 4. We could determine how 6 may be formed from 9. For 6 = 4 + 2 = 7 - 3 + 2 = 5 + 2 - 3 + 2 = 9 - 4 + 2 - 3 + 2. It may therefore be formed by taking away 4 and 3, and adding 2 and 2. If we know besides that 2 + 2 = 4, we obtain 6 from 9 in a simpler mode, by merely taking away 3.
It is sufficient, therefore, to select one of the various modes of formation of each number, as a means of ascertaining all the rest. And since things which are uniform, and therefore simple, are most easily received and retained by the understanding, there is an obvious advantage in selecting a mode of formation which shall be alike for all; in fixing the connotation of names of number on one uniform principle. The mode in which our existing numerical nomenclature is contrived possesses this advantage, with the additional one, that it happily conveys to the mind two of the modes of formation of every number. Each number is considered as formed by the addition of an unit to the number next below it in magnitude, and this mode of formation is conveyed by the place which it occupies in the series. And each is also considered as formed by the addition of a number of units less than ten, and a number of aggregates each equal to one of the successive powers of ten; and this mode of its formation is expressed by its spoken name, and by its numerical character.
[34] Mr. De Morgan, in his Formal Logic, makes the just remark, that from two such premises as Most A are B, and Most A are C, we may infer with certainty that some B are C. But this is the utmost limit of the conclusions which can be drawn from two approximate generalizations, when the precise degree of their approximation to universality is unknown or undefined.
[37] Supra, book i. ch. v. § 1, and book ii. ch. v. § 5.
[36] Supra, vol. i. p. 115.
[33] This doctrine of course assumes that the allotropic forms of what is chemically the same substance are so many different Kinds; and such, in the sense in which the word Kind is used in this treatise, they really are.
[35] Rationale of Judicial Evidence, vol. iii. p. 224.
[38] The axiom, "Equals subtracted from equals leave equal differences," may be demonstrated from the two axioms in the text. If A = a and B = b, A - B = a - b. For if not, let A - B = a - b + c. Then since B = b, adding equals to equals, A = a + c. But A = a. Therefore a = a + c, which is impossible.
What renders arithmetic the type of a deductive science, is the fortunate applicability to it of a law so comprehensive as "The sums of equals are equals:" or (to express the same principle in less familiar but more characteristic language), Whatever is made up of parts, is made up of the parts of those parts. This truth, obvious to the senses in all cases which can be fairly referred to their decision, and so general as to be coextensive with nature itself, being true of all sorts of phenomena, (for all admit of being numbered,) must be considered an inductive truth, or law of nature, of the highest order. And every arithmetical operation is an application of this law, or of other laws capable of being deduced from it. This is our warrant for all calculations. We believe that five and two are equal to seven, on the evidence of this inductive law, combined with the definitions of those numbers. We arrive at that conclusion (as all know who remember how they first learned it) by adding a single unit at a time: 5 + 1 = 6, therefore 5 + 1 + 1 = 6 + 1 = 7: and again 2 = 1 + 1, therefore 5 + 2 = 5 + 1 + 1 = 7.
§ 6. Innumerable as are the true propositions which can be formed concerning particular numbers, no adequate conception could be gained, from these alone, of the extent of the truths composing the science of number. Such propositions as we have spoken of are the least general of all numerical truths. It is true that even these are coextensive with all nature: the properties of the number four are true of all objects that are divisible into four equal parts, and all objects are either actually or ideally so divisible. But the propositions which compose the science of algebra are true, not of a particular number, but of all numbers; not of all things under the condition of being divided in a particular way, but of all things under the condition of being divided in any way—of being designated by a number at all.
Since it is impossible for different numbers to have any of their modes of formation completely in common, it is a kind of paradox to say, that all propositions which can be made concerning numbers relate to their modes of formation from other numbers, and yet that there are propositions which are true of all numbers. But this very paradox leads to the real principle of generalization concerning the properties of numbers. Two different numbers cannot be formed in the same manner from the same numbers; but they may be formed in the same manner from different numbers; as nine is formed from three by multiplying it into itself, and sixteen is formed from four by the same process. Thus there arises a classification of modes of formation, or in the language commonly used by mathematicians, a classification of Functions. Any number, considered as formed from any other number, is called a function of it; and there are as many kinds of functions as there are modes of formation. The simple functions are by no means numerous, most functions being formed by the combination of several of the operations which form simple functions, or by successive repetitions of some one of those operations. The simple functions of any number x are all reducible to the following forms: x + a, x - a, a x, x/a, xa, a√x, log. x (to the base a), and the same expressions varied by putting x for a and a for x, wherever that substitution would alter the value: to which perhaps ought to be added sin x, and arc (sin = x). All other functions of x are formed by putting some one or more of the simple functions in the place of x or a, and subjecting them to the same elementary operations.
In order to carry on general reasonings on the subject of Functions, we require a nomenclature enabling us to express any two numbers by names which, without specifying what particular numbers they are, shall show what function each is of the other; or, in other words, shall put in evidence their mode of formation from one another. The system of general language called algebraical notation does this. The expressions a and a2 + 3a denote, the one any number, the other the number formed from it in a particular manner. The expressions a, b, n, and (a + b)n, denote any three numbers, and a fourth which is formed from them in a certain mode.
The following may be stated as the general problem of the algebraical calculus: F being a certain function of a given number, to find what function F will be of any function of that number. For example, a binomial a + b is a function of its two parts a and b, and the parts are, in their turn, functions of a + b: now (a + b)n is a certain function of the binomial; what function will this be of a and b, the two parts? The answer to this question is the binomial theorem. The formula (a + b)n = an + (n / 1) an - 1 b + ((n·(n - 1)) / (1·2)) an - 2 b2 + &c., shows in what manner the number which is formed by multiplying a + b into itself n times, might be formed without that process, directly from a, b, and n. And of this nature are all the theorems of the science of number. They assert the identity of the result of different modes of formation. They affirm that some mode of formation from x, and some mode of formation from a certain function of x, produce the same number.
Besides these general theorems of formulæ, what remains in the algebraical calculus is the resolution of equations. But the resolution of an equation is also a theorem. If the equation be x2 + ax = b, the resolution of this equation, viz. x = -(1/2) a ± √(1/4)a2 + b, is a general proposition, which may be regarded as an answer to the question, If b is a certain function of x and a (namely x2 + ax), what function is x of b and a? The resolution of equations is, therefore, a mere variety of the general problem as above stated. The problem is—Given a function, what function is it of some other function? And in the resolution of an equation, the question is, to find what function of one of its own functions the number itself is.
Such as above described, is the aim and end of the calculus. As for its processes, every one knows that they are simply deductive. In demonstrating an algebraical theorem, or in resolving an equation, we travel from the datum to the quæsitum by pure ratiocination; in which the only premises introduced, besides the original hypotheses, are the fundamental axioms already mentioned—that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another, and that the sums of equal things are equal. At each step in the demonstration or in the calculation, we apply one or other of these truths, or truths deducible from them, as, that the differences, products, &c., of equal numbers are equal.
It would be inconsistent with the scale of this work, and not necessary to its design, to carry the analysis of the truths and processes of algebra any farther; which is also the less needful, as the task has been, to a very great extent, performed by other writers. Peacock's Algebra, and Dr. Whewell's Doctrine of Limits, are full of instruction on the subject. The profound treatises of a truly philosophical mathematician, Professor De Morgan, should be studied by every one who desires to comprehend the evidence of mathematical truths, and the meaning of the obscurer processes of the calculus; and the speculations of M. Comte, in his Cours de Philosophie Positive, on the philosophy of the higher branches of mathematics, are among the many valuable gifts for which philosophy is indebted to that eminent thinker.
§ 7. If the extreme generality, and remoteness not so much from sense as from the visual and tactual imagination, of the laws of number, renders it a somewhat difficult effort of abstraction to conceive those laws as being in reality physical truths obtained by observation; the same difficulty does not exist with regard to the laws of extension. The facts of which those laws are expressions, are of a kind peculiarly accessible to the senses, and suggesting eminently distinct images to the fancy. That geometry is a strictly physical science would doubtless have been recognised in all ages, had it not been for the illusions produced by two circumstances. One of these is the characteristic property, already noticed, of the facts of geometry, that they may be collected from our ideas or mental pictures of objects as effectually as from the objects themselves. The other is, the demonstrative character of geometrical truths; which was at one time supposed to constitute a radical distinction between them and physical truths, the latter, as resting on merely probable evidence, being deemed essentially uncertain and unprecise. The advance of knowledge has, however, made it manifest that physical science, in its better understood branches, is quite as demonstrative as geometry. The task of deducing its details from a few comparatively simple principles is found to be anything but the impossibility it was once supposed to be; and the notion of the superior certainty of geometry is an illusion, arising from the ancient prejudice which, in that science, mistakes the ideal data from which we reason, for a peculiar class of realities, while the corresponding ideal data of any deductive physical science are recognised as what they really are, mere hypotheses.
Every theorem in geometry is a law of external nature, and might have been ascertained by generalizing from observation and experiment, which in this case resolve themselves into comparison and measurement. But it was found practicable, and being practicable, was desirable, to deduce these truths by ratiocination from a small number of general laws of nature, the certainty and universality of which are obvious to the most careless observer, and which compose the first principles and ultimate premises of the science. Among these general laws must be included the same two which we have noticed as ultimate principles of the Science of Number also, and which are applicable to every description of quantity; viz. The sums of equals are equal, and Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another; the latter of which may be expressed in a manner more suggestive of the inexhaustible multitude of its consequences, by the following terms: Whatever is equal to any one of a number of equal magnitudes, is equal to any other of them. To these two must be added, in geometry, a third law of equality, namely, that lines, surfaces, or solid spaces, which can be so applied to one another as to coincide, are equal. Some writers have asserted that this law of nature is a mere verbal definition; that the expression "equal magnitudes" means nothing but magnitudes which can be so applied to one another as to coincide. But in this opinion I cannot agree. The equality of two geometrical magnitudes cannot differ fundamentally in its nature from the equality of two weights, two degrees of heat, or two portions of duration, to none of which would this pretended definition of equality be suitable. None of these things can be so applied to one another as to coincide, yet we perfectly understand what we mean when we call them equal. Things are equal in magnitude, as things are equal in weight, when they are felt to be exactly similar in respect of the attribute in which we compare them: and the application of the objects to each other in the one case, like the balancing them with a pair of scales in the other, is but a mode of bringing them into a position in which our senses can recognise deficiencies of exact resemblance that would otherwise escape our notice.
Along with these three general principles or axioms, the remainder of the premises of geometry consists of the so-called definitions, that is to say, propositions asserting the real existence of the various objects therein designated, together with some one property of each. In some cases more than one property is commonly assumed, but in no case is more than one necessary. It is assumed that there are such things in nature as straight lines, and that any two of them setting out from the same point, diverge more and more without limit. This assumption, (which includes and goes beyond Euclid's axiom that two straight lines cannot inclose a space,) is as indispensable in geometry, and as evident, resting on as simple, familiar, and universal observation, as any of the other axioms. It is also assumed that straight lines diverge from one another in different degrees; in other words, that there are such things as angles, and that they are capable of being equal or unequal. It is assumed that there is such a thing as a circle, and that all its radii are equal; such things as ellipses, and that the sums of the focal distances are equal for every point in an ellipse; such things as parallel lines, and that those lines are everywhere equally distant.[39]
§ 8. It is a matter of more than curiosity to consider, to what peculiarity of the physical truths which are the subject of geometry, it is owing that they can all be deduced from so small a number of original premises: why it is that we can set out from only one characteristic property of each kind of phenomenon, and with that and two or three general truths relating to equality, can travel from mark to mark until we obtain a vast body of derivative truths, to all appearance extremely unlike those elementary ones.
The explanation of this remarkable fact seems to lie in the following circumstances. In the first place, all questions of position and figure may be resolved into questions of magnitude. The position and figure of any object are determined, by determining the position of a sufficient number of points in it; and the position of any point may be determined by the magnitude of three rectangular co-ordinates, that is, of the perpendiculars drawn from the point to three planes at right angles to one another, arbitrarily selected. By this transformation of all questions of quality into questions only of quantity, geometry is reduced to the single problem of the measurement of magnitudes, that is, the ascertainment of the equalities which exist between them. Now when we consider that by one of the general axioms, any equality, when ascertained, is proof of as many other equalities as there are other things equal to either of the two equals; and that by another of those axioms, any ascertained equality is proof of the equality of as many pairs of magnitudes as can be formed by the numerous operations which resolve themselves into the addition of the equals to themselves or to other equals; we cease to wonder that in proportion as a science is conversant about equality, it should afford a more copious supply of marks of marks; and that the sciences of number and extension, which are conversant with little else than equality, should be the most deductive of all the sciences.
There are also two or three of the principal laws of space or extension which are unusually fitted for rendering one position or magnitude a mark of another, and thereby contributing to render the science largely deductive. First; the magnitudes of inclosed spaces, whether superficial or solid, are completely determined by the magnitudes of the lines and angles which bound them. Secondly, the length of any line, whether straight or curve, is measured (certain other things being given) by the angle which it subtends, and vice versâ. Lastly, the angle which any two straight lines make with each other at an inaccessible point, is measured by the angles they severally make with any third line we choose to select. By means of these general laws, the measurement of all lines, angles, and spaces whatsoever might be accomplished by measuring a single straight line and a sufficient number of angles; which is the plan actually pursued in the trigonometrical survey of a country; and fortunate it is that this is practicable, the exact measurement of long straight lines being always difficult, and often impossible, but that of angles very easy. Three such generalizations as the foregoing afford such facilities for the indirect measurement of magnitudes, (by supplying us with known lines or angles which are marks of the magnitude of unknown ones, and thereby of the spaces which they inclose,) that it is easily intelligible how from a few data we can go on to ascertain the magnitude of an indefinite multitude of lines, angles, and spaces, which we could not easily, or could not at all, measure by any more direct process.
§ 9. Such are the few remarks which it seemed necessary to make in this place, respecting the laws of nature which are the peculiar subject of the sciences of number and extension. The immense part which those laws take in giving a deductive character to the other departments of physical science, is well known; and is not surprising, when we consider that all causes operate according to mathematical laws. The effect is always dependent on, or is a function of, the quantity of the agent; and generally of its position also. We cannot, therefore, reason respecting causation, without introducing considerations of quantity and extension at every step; and if the nature of the phenomena admits of our obtaining numerical data of sufficient accuracy, the laws of quantity become the grand instrument for calculating forward to an effect, or backward to a cause. That in all other sciences, as well as in geometry, questions of quality are scarcely ever independent of questions of quantity, may be seen from the most familiar phenomena. Even when several colours are mixed on a painter's palette, the comparative quantity of each entirely determines the colour of the mixture.
With this mere suggestion of the general causes which render mathematical principles and processes so predominant in those deductive sciences which afford precise numerical data, I must, on the present occasion, content myself: referring the reader who desires a more thorough acquaintance with the subject, to the first two volumes of M. Comte's systematic work.
In the same work, and more particularly in the third volume, are also fully discussed the limits of the applicability of mathematical principles to the improvement of other sciences. Such principles are manifestly inapplicable, where the causes on which any class of phenomena depend are so imperfectly accessible to our observation, that we cannot ascertain, by a proper induction, their numerical laws; or where the causes are so numerous, and intermixed in so complex a manner with one another, that even supposing their laws known, the computation of the aggregate effect transcends the powers of the calculus as it is, or is likely to be; or lastly, where the causes themselves are in a state of perpetual fluctuation; as in physiology, and still more, if possible, in the social science. The mathematical solutions of physical questions become progressively more difficult and imperfect, in proportion as the questions divest themselves of their abstract and hypothetical character, and approach nearer to the degree of complication actually existing in nature; insomuch that beyond the limits of astronomical phenomena, and of those most nearly analogous to them, mathematical accuracy is generally obtained "at the expense of the reality of the inquiry:" while even in astronomical questions, "notwithstanding the admirable simplicity of their mathematical elements, our feeble intelligence becomes incapable of following out effectually the logical combinations of the laws on which the phenomena are dependent, as soon as we attempt to take into simultaneous consideration more than two or three essential influences."[40] Of this, the problem of the Three Bodies has already been cited, more than once, as a remarkable instance; the complete solution of so comparatively simple a question having vainly tried the skill of the most profound mathematicians. We may conceive, then, how chimerical would be the hope that mathematical principles could be advantageously applied to phenomena dependent on the mutual action of the innumerable minute particles of bodies, as those of chemistry, and still more, of physiology; and for similar reasons those principles remain inapplicable to the still more complex inquiries, the subjects of which are phenomena of society and government.
The value of mathematical instruction as a preparation for those more difficult investigations, consists in the applicability not of its doctrines, but of its method. Mathematics will ever remain the most perfect type of the Deductive Method in general; and the applications of mathematics to the deductive branches of physics, furnish the only school in which philosophers can effectually learn the most difficult and important portion of their art, the employment of the laws of simpler phenomena for explaining and predicting those of the more complex. These grounds are quite sufficient for deeming mathematical training an indispensable basis of real scientific education, and regarding (according to the dictum which an old but unauthentic tradition ascribes to Plato) one who is ἀγεωμέτρητος, as wanting in one of the most essential qualifications for the successful cultivation of the higher branches of philosophy.
CHAPTER XXV.
OF THE GROUNDS OF DISBELIEF.
§ 1. The method of arriving at general truths, or general propositions fit to be believed, and the nature of the evidence on which they are grounded, have been discussed, as far as space and the writer's faculties permitted, in the twenty-four preceding chapters. But the result of the examination of evidence is not always belief, nor even suspension of judgment; it is sometimes disbelief. The philosophy, therefore, of induction and experimental inquiry is incomplete, unless the grounds not only of belief, but of disbelief, are treated of; and to this topic we shall devote one, and the final, chapter.
By disbelief is not here to be understood the mere absence of belief. The ground for abstaining from belief is simply the absence or insufficiency of proof; and in considering what is sufficient evidence to support any given conclusion, we have already, by implication, considered what evidence is not sufficient for the same purpose. By disbelief is here meant, not the state of mind in which we form no opinion concerning a subject, but that in which we are fully persuaded that some opinion is not true; insomuch that if evidence, even of great apparent strength, (whether grounded on the testimony of others or on our own supposed perceptions,) were produced in favour of the opinion, we should believe that the witnesses spoke falsely, or that they, or we ourselves if we were the direct percipients, were mistaken.
That there are such cases, no one is likely to dispute. Assertions for which there is abundant positive evidence are often disbelieved, on account of what is called their improbability, or impossibility. And the question for consideration is what, in the present case, these words mean, and how far and in what circumstances the properties which they express are sufficient grounds for disbelief.
§ 2. It is to be remarked in the first place, that the positive evidence produced in support of an assertion which is nevertheless rejected on the score of impossibility or improbability, is never such as amounts to full proof. It is always grounded on some approximate generalization. The fact may have been asserted by a hundred witnesses; but there are many exceptions to the universality of the generalization that what a hundred witnesses affirm is true. We may seem to ourselves to have actually seen the fact: but, that we really see what we think we see, is by no means an universal truth; our organs may have been in a morbid state; or we may have inferred something, and imagined that we perceived it. The evidence, then, in the affirmative being never more than an approximate generalization, all will depend on what the evidence in the negative is. If that also rests on an approximate generalization, it is a case for comparison of probabilities. If the approximate generalizations leading to the affirmative are, when added together, less strong, or in other words, farther from being universal, than the approximate generalizations which support the negative side of the question, the proposition is said to be improbable, and is to be disbelieved provisionally. If however an alleged fact be in contradiction, not to any number of approximate generalizations, but to a completed generalization grounded on a rigorous induction, it is said to be impossible, and is to be disbelieved totally.
This last principle, simple and evident as it appears, is the doctrine which, on the occasion of an attempt to apply it to the question of the credibility of miracles, excited so violent a controversy. Hume's celebrated doctrine, that nothing is credible which is contradictory to experience, or at variance with laws of nature, is merely this very plain and harmless proposition, that whatever is contradictory to a complete induction is incredible. That such a maxim as this should either be accounted a dangerous heresy, or mistaken for a great and recondite truth, speaks ill for the state of philosophical speculation on such subjects.
But does not (it may be asked) the very statement of the proposition imply a contradiction? An alleged fact, according to this theory, is not to be believed if it contradict a complete induction. But it is essential to the completeness of an induction that it shall not contradict any known fact. Is it not then a petitio principii to say, that the fact ought to be disbelieved because the induction opposed to it is complete? How can we have a right to declare the induction complete, while facts, supported by credible evidence, present themselves in opposition to it?
I answer, we have that right whenever the scientific canons of induction give it to us; that is, whenever the induction can be complete. We have it, for example, in a case of causation in which there has been an experimentum crucis. If an antecedent A, superadded to a set of antecedents in all other respects unaltered, is followed by an effect B which did not exist before, A is, in that instance at least, the cause of B, or an indispensable part of its cause; and if A be tried again with many totally different sets of antecedents and B still follows, then it is the whole cause. If these observations or experiments have been repeated so often, and by so many persons, as to exclude all supposition of error in the observer, a law of nature is established; and so long as this law is received as such, the assertion that on any particular occasion A took place, and yet B did not follow, without any counteracting cause, must be disbelieved. Such an assertion is not to be credited on any less evidence than what would suffice to overturn the law. The general truths, that whatever has a beginning has a cause, and that when none but the same causes exist, the same effects follow, rest on the strongest inductive evidence possible; the proposition that things affirmed by even a crowd of respectable witnesses are true, is but an approximate generalization; and—even if we fancy we actually saw or felt the fact which is in contradiction to the law—what a human being can see is no more than a set of appearances; from which the real nature of the phenomenon is merely an inference, and in this inference approximate generalizations usually have a large share. If, therefore, we make our election to hold by the law, no quantity of evidence whatever ought to persuade us that there has occurred anything in contradiction to it. If, indeed, the evidence produced is such that it is more likely that the set of observations and experiments on which the law rests should have been inaccurately performed or incorrectly interpreted, than that the evidence in question should be false, we may believe the evidence; but then we must abandon the law. And since the law was received on what seemed a complete induction, it can only be rejected on evidence equivalent; namely, as being inconsistent not with any number of approximate generalizations, but with some other and better established law of nature. This extreme case, of a conflict between two supposed laws of nature, has probably never actually occurred where, in the process of investigating both the laws, the true canons of scientific induction had been kept in view; but if it did occur, it must terminate in the total rejection of one of the supposed laws. It would prove that there must be a flaw in the logical process by which either one or the other was established: and if there be so, that supposed general truth is no truth at all. We cannot admit a proposition as a law of nature, and yet believe a fact in real contradiction to it. We must disbelieve the alleged fact, or believe that we were mistaken in admitting the supposed law.
But in order that any alleged fact should be contradictory to a law of causation, the allegation must be, not simply that the cause existed without being followed by the effect, for that would be no uncommon occurrence; but that this happened in the absence of any adequate counteracting cause. Now in the case of an alleged miracle, the assertion is the exact opposite of this. It is, that the effect was defeated, not in the absence, but in consequence of a counteracting cause, namely, a direct interposition of an act of the will of some being who has power over nature; and in particular of a Being, whose will being assumed to have endowed all the causes with the powers by which they produce their effects, may well be supposed able to counteract them. A miracle (as was justly remarked by Brown[41]) is no contradiction to the law of cause and effect; it is a new effect, supposed to be produced by the introduction of a new cause. Of the adequacy of that cause, if present, there can be no doubt; and the only antecedent improbability which can be ascribed to the miracle, is the improbability that any such cause existed.
All, therefore, which Hume has made out, and this he must be considered to have made out, is, that (at least in the imperfect state of our knowledge of natural agencies, which leaves it always possible that some of the physical antecedents may have been hidden from us,) no evidence can prove a miracle to any one who did not previously believe the existence of a being or beings with supernatural power; or who believes himself to have full proof that the character of the Being whom he recognises, is inconsistent with his having seen fit to interfere on the occasion in question.
If we do not already believe in supernatural agencies, no miracle can prove to us their existence. The miracle itself, considered merely as an extraordinary fact, may be satisfactorily certified by our senses or by testimony; but nothing can ever prove that it is a miracle: there is still another possible hypothesis, that of its being the result of some unknown natural cause: and this possibility cannot be so completely shut out, as to leave no alternative but that of admitting the existence and intervention of a being superior to nature. Those, however, who already believe in such a being, have two hypotheses to choose from, a supernatural and an unknown natural agency; and they have to judge which of the two is the most probable in the particular case. In forming this judgment, an important element of the question will be the conformity of the result to the laws of the supposed agent, that is, to the character of the Deity as they conceive it. But, with the knowledge which we now possess of the general uniformity of the course of nature, religion, following in the wake of science, has been compelled to acknowledge the government of the universe as being on the whole carried on by general laws, and not by special interpositions. To whoever holds this belief, there is a general presumption against any supposition of divine agency not operating through general laws, or in other words, there is an antecedent improbability in every miracle, which, in order to outweigh it, requires an extraordinary strength of antecedent probability derived from the special circumstances of the case.
§ 3. It appears from what has been said, that the assertion that a cause has been defeated of an effect which is connected with it by a completely ascertained law of causation, is to be disbelieved or not, according to the probability or improbability that there existed in the particular instance an adequate counteracting cause. To form an estimate of this, is not more difficult than of other probabilities. With regard to all known causes capable of counteracting the given causes, we have generally some previous knowledge of the frequency or rarity of their occurrence, from which we may draw an inference as to the antecedent improbability of their having been present in any particular case. And neither in respect to known or unknown causes are we required to pronounce on the probability of their existing in nature, but only of their having existed at the time and place at which the transaction is alleged to have happened. We are seldom, therefore, without the means (when the circumstances of the case are at all known to us) of judging how far it is likely that such a cause should have existed at that time and place without manifesting its presence by some other marks, and (in the case of an unknown cause) without having hitherto manifested its existence in any other instance. According as this circumstance, or the falsity of the testimony, appears more improbable, that is, conflicts with an approximate generalization of a higher order, we believe the testimony, or disbelieve it; with a stronger or a weaker degree of conviction, according to the preponderance: at least until we have sifted the matter further.
So much, then, for the case in which the alleged fact conflicts, or appears to conflict, with a real law of causation. But a more common case, perhaps, is that of its conflicting with uniformities of mere coexistence, not proved to be dependent on causation: in other words, with the properties of Kinds. It is with these uniformities principally, that the marvellous stories related by travellers are apt to be at variance: as of men with tails, or with wings, and (until confirmed by experience) of flying fish; or of ice, in the celebrated anecdote of the Dutch travellers and the King of Siam. Facts of this description, facts previously unheard of but which could not from any known law of causation be pronounced impossible, are what Hume characterizes as not contrary to experience, but merely unconformable to it; and Bentham, in his treatise on Evidence, denominates them facts disconformable in specie, as distinguished from such as are disconformable in toto or in degree.
In a case of this description, the fact asserted is the existence of a new Kind; which in itself is not in the slightest degree incredible, and only to be rejected if the improbability that any variety of object existing at the particular place and time should not have been discovered sooner, be greater than that of error or mendacity in the witnesses. Accordingly, such assertions, when made by credible persons, and of unexplored places, are not disbelieved, but at most regarded as requiring confirmation from subsequent observers; unless the alleged properties of the supposed new Kind are at variance with known properties of some larger kind which includes it; or in other words, unless, in the new Kind which is asserted to exist, some properties are said to have been found disjoined from others which have always been known to accompany them; as in the case of Pliny's men, or any other kind of animal of a structure different from that which has always been found to coexist with animal life. On the mode of dealing with any such case, little needs be added to what has been said on the same topic in the twenty-second chapter.[42] When the uniformities of coexistence which the alleged fact would violate, are such as to raise a strong presumption of their being the result of causation, the fact which conflicts with them is to be disbelieved; at least provisionally, and subject to further investigation. When the presumption amounts to a virtual certainty, as in the case of the general structure of organized beings, the only question requiring consideration is whether, in phenomena so little understood, there may not be liabilities to counteraction from causes hitherto unknown; or whether the phenomena may not be capable of originating in some other way, which would produce a different set of derivative uniformities. Where (as in the case of the flying fish, or the ornithorhynchus) the generalization to which the alleged fact would be an exception is very special and of limited range, neither of the above suppositions can be deemed very improbable; and it is generally, in the case of such alleged anomalies, wise to suspend our judgment, pending the subsequent inquiries which will not fail to confirm the assertion if it be true. But when the generalization is very comprehensive, embracing a vast number and variety of observations, and covering a considerable province of the domain of nature; then, for reasons which have been fully explained, such an empirical law comes near to the certainty of an ascertained law of causation: and any alleged exception to it cannot be admitted, unless on the evidence of some law of causation proved by a still more complete induction.
Such uniformities in the course of nature as do not bear marks of being the results of causation, are, as we have already seen, admissible as universal truths with a degree of credence proportioned to their generality. Those which are true of all things whatever, or at least which are totally independent of the varieties of Kinds, namely, the laws of number and extension, to which we may add the law of causation itself, are probably the only ones, an exception to which is absolutely and permanently incredible. Accordingly, it is to assertions supposed to be contradictory to these laws, or to some others coming near to them in generality, that the word impossibility (at least total impossibility) seems to be generally confined. Violations of other laws, of special laws of causation for instance, are said, by persons studious of accuracy in expression, to be impossible in the circumstances of the case; or impossible unless some cause had existed which did not exist in the particular case.[43] Of no assertion, not in contradiction to some of these very general laws, will more than improbability be asserted by any cautious person; and improbability not of the highest degree, unless the time and place in which the fact is said to have occurred, render it almost certain that the anomaly, if real, could not have been overlooked by other observers. Suspension of judgment is in all other cases the resource of the judicious inquirer; provided the testimony in favour of the anomaly presents, when well sifted, no suspicious circumstances.
But the testimony is scarcely ever found to stand that test, in cases in which the anomaly is not real. In the instances on record in which a great number of witnesses, of good reputation and scientific acquirements, have testified to the truth of something which has turned out untrue, there have almost always been circumstances which, to a keen observer who had taken due pains to sift the matter, would have rendered the testimony untrustworthy. There have generally been means of accounting for the impression on the senses or minds of the alleged percipients, by fallacious appearances; or some epidemic delusion, propagated by the contagious influence of popular feeling, has been concerned in the case; or some strong interest has been implicated—religious zeal, party feeling, vanity, or at least the passion for the marvellous, in persons strongly susceptible of it. When none of these or similar circumstances exist to account for the apparent strength of the testimony; and where the assertion is not in contradiction either to those universal laws which know no counteraction or anomaly, or to the generalizations next in comprehensiveness to them, but would only amount, if admitted, to the existence of an unknown cause or an anomalous Kind, in circumstances not so thoroughly explored but that it is credible that things hitherto unknown may still come to light; a cautious person will neither admit nor reject the testimony, but will wait for confirmation at other times and from other unconnected sources. Such ought to have been the conduct of the King of Siam when the Dutch travellers affirmed to him the existence of ice. But an ignorant person is as obstinate in his contemptuous incredulity as he is unreasonably credulous. Anything unlike his own narrow experience he disbelieves, if it flatters no propensity; any nursery tale is swallowed implicitly by him if it does.
§ 4. I shall now advert to a very serious misapprehension of the principles of the subject, which has been committed by some of the writers against Hume's Essay on Miracles, and by Bishop Butler before them, in their anxiety to destroy what appeared to them a formidable weapon of assault against the Christian religion; and the effect of which is entirely to confound the doctrine of the Grounds of Disbelief. The mistake consists in overlooking the distinction between (what may be called) improbability before the fact, and improbability after it; or (since, as Mr. Venn remarks, the distinction of past and future is not the material circumstance) between the improbability of a mere guess being right, and the improbability of an alleged fact being true.
Many events are altogether improbable to us, before they have happened, or before we are informed of their happening, which are not in the least incredible when we are informed of them, because not contrary to any, even approximate, induction. In the cast of a perfectly fair die, the chances are five to one against throwing ace, that is, ace will be thrown on an average only once in six throws. But this is no reason against believing that ace was thrown on a given occasion, if any credible witness asserts it; since though ace is only thrown once in six times, some number which is only thrown once in six times must have been thrown if the die was thrown at all. The improbability, then, or in other words, the unusualness, of any fact, is no reason for disbelieving it, if the nature of the case renders it certain that either that or something equally improbable, that is, equally unusual, did happen. Nor is this all: for even if the other five sides of the die were all twos, or all threes, yet as ace would still on the average come up once in every six throws, its coming up in a given throw would be not in any way contradictory to experience. If we disbelieved all facts which had the chances against them beforehand, we should believe hardly anything. We are told that A. B. died yesterday: the moment before we were so told, the chances against his having died on that day may have been ten thousand to one; but since he was certain to die at some time or other, and when he died must necessarily die on some particular day, while the preponderance of chances is very great against every day in particular, experience affords no ground for discrediting any testimony which may be produced to the event's having taken place on a given day.
Yet it has been considered, by Dr. Campbell and others, as a complete answer to Hume's doctrine (that things are incredible which are contrary to the uniform course of experience), that we do not disbelieve, merely because the chances were against them, things in strict conformity to the uniform course of experience; that we do not disbelieve an alleged fact merely because the combination of causes on which it depends occurs only once in a certain number of times. It is evident that whatever is shown by observation, or can be proved from laws of nature, to occur in a certain proportion (however small) of the whole number of possible cases, is not contrary to experience; though we are right in disbelieving it, if some other supposition respecting the matter in question involves on the whole a less departure from the ordinary course of events. Yet, on such grounds as this have able writers been led to the extraordinary conclusion, that nothing supported by credible testimony ought ever to be disbelieved.
§ 5. We have considered two species of events, commonly said to be improbable; one kind which are in no way extraordinary, but which, having an immense preponderance of chances against them, are improbable until they are affirmed, but no longer; another kind which, being contrary to some recognised law of nature, are incredible on any amount of testimony except such as would be sufficient to shake our belief in the law itself. But between these two classes of events, there is an intermediate class, consisting of what are commonly termed Coincidences: in other words, those combinations of chances which present some peculiar and unexpected regularity, assimilating them, in so far, to the results of law. As if, for example, in a lottery of a thousand tickets, the numbers should be drawn in the exact order of what are called the natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, &c. We have still to consider the principles of evidence applicable to this case: whether there is any difference between coincidences and ordinary events, in the amount of testimony or other evidence necessary to render them credible.
It is certain, that on every rational principle of expectation, a combination of this peculiar sort may be expected quite as often as any other given series of a thousand numbers; that with perfectly fair dice, sixes will be thrown twice, thrice, or any number of times in succession, quite as often in a thousand or a million throws, as any other succession of numbers fixed upon beforehand; and that no judicious player would give greater odds against the one series than against the other. Notwithstanding this, there is a general disposition to regard the one as much more improbable than the other, and as requiring much stronger evidence to make it credible. Such is the force of this impression, that it has led some thinkers to the conclusion, that nature has greater difficulty in producing regular combinations than irregular ones; or in other words, that there is some general tendency of things, some law, which prevents regular combinations from occurring, or at least from occurring so often as others. Among these thinkers may be numbered D'Alembert; who, in an Essay on Probabilities to be found in the fifth volume of his Mélanges, contends that regular combinations, though equally probable according to the mathematical theory with any others, are physically less probable. He appeals to common sense, or in other words, to common impressions; saying, if dice thrown repeatedly in our presence gave sixes every time, should we not, before the number of throws had reached ten, (not to speak of thousands of millions,) be ready to affirm, with the most positive conviction, that the dice were false?
The common and natural impression is in favour of D'Alembert: the regular series would be thought much more unlikely than an irregular. But this common impression is, I apprehend, merely grounded on the fact, that scarcely anybody remembers to have ever seen one of these peculiar coincidences: the reason of which is simply that no one's experience extends to anything like the number of trials, within which that or any other given combination of events can be expected to happen. The chance of sixes on a single throw of two dice being 1/36, the chance of sixes ten times in succession is 1 divided by the tenth power of 36; in other words, such a concurrence is only likely to happen once in 3,656,158,440,062,976 trials, a number which no dice-player's experience comes up to a millionth part of. But if, instead of sixes ten times, any other given succession of ten throws had been fixed upon, it would have been exactly as unlikely that in any individual's experience that particular succession had ever occurred; although this does not seem equally improbable, because no one could possibly have remembered whether it had occurred or not, and because the comparison is tacitly made, not between sixes ten times and any one particular series of throws, but between all regular and all irregular successions taken together.
That (as D'Alembert says) if the succession of sixes was actually thrown before our eyes, we should ascribe it not to chance, but to unfairness in the dice, is unquestionably true. But this arises from a totally different principle. We should then be considering, not the probability of the fact in itself, but the comparative probability with which, when it is known to have happened, it may be referred to one or to another cause. The regular series is not at all less likely than the irregular one to be brought about by chance, but it is much more likely than the irregular one to be produced by design; or by some general cause operating through the structure of the dice. It is the nature of casual combinations to produce a repetition of the same event, as often and no oftener than any other series of events. But it is the nature of general causes to reproduce, in the same circumstances, always the same event. Common sense and science alike dictate that, all other things being the same, we should rather attribute the effect to a cause which if real would be very likely to produce it, than to a cause which would be very unlikely to produce it. According to Laplace's sixth theorem, which we demonstrated in a former chapter, the difference of probability arising from the superior efficacy of the constant cause, unfairness in the dice, would after a very few throws far outweigh any antecedent probability which there could be against its existence.
D'Alembert should have put the question in another manner. He should have supposed that we had ourselves previously tried the dice, and knew by ample experience that they were fair. Another person then tries them in our absence, and assures us that he threw sixes ten times in succession. Is the assertion credible or not? Here the effect to be accounted for is not the occurrence itself, but the fact of the witness's asserting it. This may arise either from its having really happened, or from some other cause. What we have to estimate is the comparative probability of these two suppositions.
If the witness affirmed that he had thrown any other series of numbers, supposing him to be a person of veracity, and tolerable accuracy, and to profess that he took particular notice, we should believe him. But the ten sixes are exactly as likely to have been really thrown as the other series. If, therefore, this assertion is less credible than the other, the reason must be, not that it is less likely than the other to be made truly, but that it is more likely than the other to be made falsely.
One reason obviously presents itself why what is called a coincidence, should be oftener asserted falsely than an ordinary combination. It excites wonder. It gratifies the love of the marvellous. The motives, therefore, to falsehood, one of the most frequent of which is the desire to astonish, operate more strongly in favour of this kind of assertion than of the other kind. Thus far there is evidently more reason for discrediting an alleged coincidence, than a statement in itself not more probable, but which if made would not be thought remarkable. There are cases, however, in which the presumption on this ground would be the other way. There are some witnesses who, the more extraordinary an occurrence might appear, would be the more anxious to verify it by the utmost carefulness of observation before they would venture to believe it, and still more before they would assert it to others.
§ 6. Independently, however, of any peculiar chances of mendacity arising from the nature of the assertion, Laplace contends, that merely on the general ground of the fallibility of testimony, a coincidence is not credible on the same amount of testimony on which we should be warranted in believing an ordinary combination of events. In order to do justice to his argument, it is necessary to illustrate it by the example chosen by himself.
If, says Laplace, there were one thousand tickets in a box, and one only has been drawn out, then if an eye-witness affirms that the number drawn was 79, this, though the chances were 999 in 1000 against it, is not on that account the less credible; its credibility is equal to the antecedent probability of the witness's veracity. But if there were in the box 999 black balls and only one white, and the witness affirms that the white ball was drawn, the case according to Laplace is very different: the credibility of his assertion is but a small fraction of what it was in the former case; the reason of the difference being as follows.
The witnesses of whom we are speaking must, from the nature of the case, be of a kind whose credibility falls materially short of certainty: let us suppose, then, the credibility of the witness in the case in question to be 9/10; that is, let us suppose that in every ten statements which the witness makes, nine on an average are correct, and one incorrect. Let us now suppose that there have taken place a sufficient number of drawings to exhaust all the possible combinations, the witness deposing in every one. In one case out of every ten in all these drawings he will actually have made a false announcement. But in the case of the thousand tickets these false announcements will have been distributed impartially over all the numbers, and of the 999 cases in which No. 79 was not drawn, there will have been only one case in which it was announced. On the contrary, in the case of the thousand balls, (the announcement being always either "black" or "white,") if white was not drawn, and there was a false announcement, that false announcement must have been white; and since by the supposition there was a false announcement once in every ten times, white will have been announced falsely in one tenth part of all the cases in which it was not drawn, that is, in one tenth part of 999 cases out of every thousand. White, then, is drawn, on an average, exactly as often as No. 79, but it is announced, without having been really drawn, 999 times as often as No. 79; the announcement therefore requires a much greater amount of testimony to render it credible.[44]
To make this argument valid it must of course be supposed, that the announcements made by the witness are average specimens of his general veracity and accuracy; or, at least, that they are neither more nor less so in the case of the black and white balls, than in the case of the thousand tickets. This assumption, however, is not warranted. A person is far less likely to mistake, who has only one form of error to guard against, than if he had 999 different errors to avoid. For instance, in the example chosen, a messenger who might make a mistake once in ten times in reporting the number drawn in a lottery, might not err once in a thousand times if sent simply to observe whether a ball was black or white. Laplace's argument therefore is faulty even as applied to his own case. Still less can that case be received as completely representing all cases of coincidence. Laplace has so contrived his example, that though black answers to 999 distinct possibilities, and white only to one, the witness has nevertheless no bias which can make him prefer black to white. The witness did not know that there were 999 black balls in the box and only one white; or if he did, Laplace has taken care to make all the 999 cases so undistinguishably alike, that there is hardly a possibility of any cause of falsehood or error operating in favour of any of them, which would not operate in the same manner if there were only one. Alter this supposition, and the whole argument falls to the ground. Let the balls, for instance, be numbered, and let the white ball be No. 79. Considered in respect of their colour, there are but two things which the witness can be interested in asserting, or can have dreamt or hallucinated, or has to choose from if he answers at random, viz. black and white: but considered in respect of the numbers attached to them, there are a thousand: and if his interest or error happens to be connected with the numbers, though the only assertion he makes is about the colour, the case becomes precisely assimilated to that of the thousand tickets. Or instead of the balls suppose a lottery, with 1000 tickets and but one prize, and that I hold No. 79, and being interested only in that, ask the witness not what was the number drawn, but whether it was 79 or some other. There are now only two cases, as in Laplace's example; yet he surely would not say that if the witness answered 79, the assertion would be in an enormous proportion less credible, than if he made the same answer to the same question asked in the other way. If, for instance, (to put a case supposed by Laplace himself,) he has staked a large sum on one of the chances, and thinks that by announcing its occurrence he shall increase his credit; he is equally likely to have betted on any one of the 999 numbers which are attached to black balls, and so far as the chances of mendacity from this cause are concerned, there will be 999 times as many chances of his announcing black falsely, as white.
Or suppose a regiment of 1000 men, 999 Englishmen and one Frenchman, and that of these one man has been killed, and it is not known which. I ask the question, and the witness answers, the Frenchman. This was not only as improbable à priori, but is in itself as singular a circumstance, as remarkable a coincidence, as the drawing of the white ball: yet we should believe the statement as readily, as if the answer had been John Thompson. Because though the 999 Englishmen were all alike in the point in which they differed from the Frenchman, they were not, like the 999 black balls, undistinguishable in every other respect; but being all different, they admitted as many chances of interest or error, as if each man had been of a different nation; and if a lie was told or a mistake made, the misstatement was as likely to fall on any Jones or Thompson of the set, as on the Frenchman.
The example of a coincidence selected by D'Alembert, that of sixes thrown on a pair of dice ten times in succession, belongs to this sort of cases rather than to such as Laplace's. The coincidence is here far more remarkable, because of far rarer occurrence, than the drawing of the white ball. But though the improbability of its really occurring is greater, the superior probability of its being announced falsely cannot be established with the same evidence. The announcement "black" represented 999 cases, but the witness may not have known this, and if he did, the 999 cases are so exactly alike, that there is really only one set of possible causes of mendacity corresponding to the whole. The announcement "sixes not drawn ten times," represents, and is known by the witness to represent, a great multitude of contingencies, every one of which being unlike every other, there may be a different and a fresh set of causes of mendacity corresponding to each.
It appears to me, therefore, that Laplace's doctrine is not strictly true of any coincidences, and is wholly inapplicable to most: and that to know whether a coincidence does or does not require more evidence to render it credible than an ordinary event, we must refer, in every instance, to first principles, and estimate afresh what is the probability that the given testimony would have been delivered in that instance, supposing the fact which it asserts not to be true.
With these remarks we close the discussion of the Grounds of Disbelief; and along with it, such exposition as space admits, and as the writer has it in his power to furnish, of the Logic of Induction.
[43] A writer to whom I have several times referred, gives as the definition of an impossibility, that which there exists in the world no cause adequate to produce. This definition does not take in such impossibilities as these—that two and two should make five; that two straight lines should inclose a space; or that anything should begin to exist without a cause. I can think of no definition of impossibility comprehensive enough to include all its varieties, except the one which I have given: viz. An impossibility is that, the truth of which would conflict with a complete induction, that is, with the most conclusive evidence which we possess of universal truth.
[41] See the two remarkable notes (A) and (F), appended to his Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect.
[39] Geometers have usually preferred to define parallel lines by the property of being in the same plane and never meeting. This, however, has rendered it necessary for them to assume, as an additional axiom, some other property of parallel lines; and the unsatisfactory manner in which properties for that purpose have been selected by Euclid and others has always been deemed the opprobrium of elementary geometry. Even as a verbal definition, equidistance is a fitter property to characterize parallels by, since it is the attribute really involved in the signification of the name. If to be in the same plane and never to meet were all that is meant by being parallel, we should feel no incongruity in speaking of a curve as parallel to its asymptote. The meaning of parallel lines is, lines which pursue exactly the same direction, and which, therefore, neither draw nearer nor go farther from one another; a conception suggested at once by the contemplation of nature. That the lines will never meet is of course included in the more comprehensive proposition that they are everywhere equally distant. And that any straight lines which are in the same plane and not equidistant will certainly meet, may be demonstrated in the most rigorous manner from the fundamental property of straight lines assumed in the text, viz. that if they set out from the same point, they diverge more and more without limit.
[40] Philosophie Positive, iii. 414-416.
[42] Supra, pp. 119, 120.
[44] Not, however, as might at first sight appear, 999 times as much. A complete analysis of the cases shows that (always assuming the veracity of the witness to be 9/10) in 10,000 drawings, the drawing of No. 79 will occur nine times, and be announced incorrectly once; the credibility therefore of the announcement of No. 79 is 9/10; while the drawing of a white ball will occur nine times, and be announced incorrectly 999 times. The credibility therefore of the announcement of white is 9/1008, and the ratio of the two 1008:10; the one announcement being thus only about a hundred times more credible than the other, instead of 999 times.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cours de Philosophie Positive, ii. 656.
[2] Vide supra, book iii. ch. xi.
[3] Philosophy of Discovery, pp. 185 et seqq.
[4] Philosophie Positive, ii. 434-437.
[5] As an example of legitimate hypothesis according to the test here laid down, has been justly cited that of Broussais, who, proceeding on the very rational principle that every disease must originate in some definite part or other of the organism, boldly assumed that certain fevers, which not being known to be local were called constitutional, had their origin in the mucous membrane of the alimentary canal. The supposition was indeed, as is now generally admitted, erroneous; but he was justified in making it, since by deducing the consequences of the supposition, and comparing them with the facts of those maladies, he might be certain of disproving his hypothesis if it was ill founded, and might expect that the comparison would materially aid him in framing another more conformable to the phenomena.
The doctrine now universally received, that the earth is a natural magnet, was originally an hypothesis of the celebrated Gilbert.
Another hypothesis, to the legitimacy of which no objection can lie, and which is well calculated to light the path of scientific inquiry, is that suggested by several recent writers, that the brain is a voltaic pile, and that each of its pulsations is a discharge of electricity through the system. It has been remarked that the sensation felt by the hand from the beating of a brain, bears a strong resemblance to a voltaic shock. And the hypothesis, if followed to its consequences, might afford a plausible explanation of many physiological facts, while there is nothing to discourage the hope that we may in time sufficiently understand the conditions of voltaic phenomena to render the truth of the hypothesis amenable to observation and experiment.
The attempt to localize, in different regions of the brain, the physical organs of our different mental faculties and propensities, was, on the part of its original author, a legitimate example of a scientific hypothesis; and we ought not, therefore, to blame him for the extremely slight grounds on which he often proceeded, in an operation which could only be tentative, though we may regret that materials barely sufficient for a first rude hypothesis should have been hastily worked up into the vain semblance of a science. If there be really a connexion between the scale of mental endowments and the various degrees of complication in the cerebral system, the nature of that connexion was in no other way so likely to be brought to light as by framing, in the first instance, an hypothesis similar to that of Gall. But the verification of any such hypothesis is attended, from the peculiar nature of the phenomena, with difficulties which phrenologists have not shown themselves even competent to appreciate, much less to overcome.
Mr. Darwin's remarkable speculation on the Origin of Species is another unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis. What he terms "natural selection" is not only a vera causa, but one proved to be capable of producing effects of the same kind with those which the hypothesis ascribes to it: the question of possibility is entirely one of degree. It is unreasonable to accuse Mr. Darwin (as has been done) of violating the rules of Induction. The rules of Induction are concerned with the conditions of Proof. Mr. Darwin has never pretended that his doctrine was proved. He was not bound by the rules of Induction, but by those of Hypothesis. And these last have seldom been more completely fulfilled. He has opened a path of inquiry full of promise, the results of which none can foresee. And is it not a wonderful feat of scientific knowledge and ingenuity to have rendered so bold a suggestion, which the first impulse of every one was to reject at once, admissible and discussable, even as a conjecture?
[6] Whewell's Phil. of Discovery, pp. 275, 276.
[7] What has most contributed to accredit the hypothesis of a physical medium for the conveyance of light, is the certain fact that light travels, (which cannot be proved of gravitation,) that its communication is not instantaneous, but requires time, and that it is intercepted (which gravitation is not) by intervening objects. These are analogies between its phenomena and those of the mechanical motion of a solid or fluid substance. But we are not entitled to assume that mechanical motion is the only power in nature capable of exhibiting those attributes.
[8] Phil. of Disc. p. 274.
[9] P. 271.
[10] P. 251 and the whole of Appendix G.
[11] In Dr. Whewell's latest version of his theory (Philosophy of Discovery, p. 331) he makes a concession respecting the medium of the transmission of light, which, taken in conjunction with the rest of his doctrine on the subject, is not, I confess, very intelligible to me, but which goes far towards removing, if it does not actually remove, the whole of the difference between us. He is contending, against Sir William Hamilton, that all matter has weight. Sir William, in proof of the contrary, cited the luminiferous ether, and the calorific and electric fluids, "which," he said, "we can neither denude of their character of substance, nor clothe with the attribute of weight." "To which," continues Dr. Whewell, "my reply is, that precisely because I cannot clothe these agents with the attribute of Weight, I do denude them of the character of Substance. They are not substances, but agencies. These Imponderable Agents, are not properly called Imponderable Fluids. This I conceive that I have proved." Nothing can be more philosophical. But if the luminiferous ether is not matter, and fluid matter too, what is the meaning of its undulations? Can an agency undulate? Can there be alternate motion forward and backward of the particles of an agency? And does not the whole mathematical theory of the undulations imply them to be material? Is it not a series of deductions from the known properties of elastic fluids? This opinion of Dr. Whewell reduces the undulations to a figure of speech, and the undulatory theory to the proposition which all must admit, that the transmission of light takes place according to laws which present a very striking and remarkable agreement with those of undulations. If Dr. Whewell is prepared to stand by this doctrine, I have no difference with him on the subject.
Since this chapter was written, the hypothesis of the luminiferous ether has acquired a great accession of apparent strength, by being adopted into the new doctrine of the Conservation of Force, as affording a mechanism by which to explain the mode of production not of light only, but of heat, and probably of all the other so-called imponderable agencies. In the present immature stage of the great speculation in question, I would not undertake to define the ultimate relation of the hypothetical fluid to it; but I must remark that the essential part of the new theory, the reciprocal convertibility and interchangeability of these great cosmic agencies, is quite independent of the molecular motions which have been imagined as the immediate causes of those different manifestations and of their substitutions for one another; and the former doctrine by no means necessarily carries the latter with it. I confess that the entire theory of the vibrations of the ether, and the movements which these vibrations are supposed to communicate to the particles of solid bodies, seems to me at present the weakest part of the new system, tending rather to weigh down than to prop up those of its doctrines which rest on real scientific induction.
[12] Thus, water, of which eight-ninths in weight are oxygen, dissolves most bodies which contain a high proportion of oxygen, such as all the nitrates, (which have more oxygen than any others of the common salts,) most of the sulphates, many of the carbonates, &c. Again, bodies largely composed of combustible elements, like hydrogen and carbon, are soluble in bodies of similar composition; rosin, for instance, will dissolve in alcohol, tar in oil of turpentine. This empirical generalization is far from being universally true; no doubt because it is a remote, and therefore easily defeated, result of general laws too deep for us at present to penetrate; but it will probably in time suggest processes of inquiry, leading to the discovery of those laws.
[13] Or (according to Laplace's theory) the sun and the sun's rotation.
[14] Supra, book iii. ch. v. § 7.
[15] Supra, book iii. ch. x. § 2.
[16] In the preceding discussion, the mean is spoken of as if it were exactly the same thing with the average. But the mean for purposes of inductive inquiry, is not the average, or arithmetical mean, though in a familiar illustration of the theory the difference may be disregarded. If the deviations on one side of the average are much more numerous than those on the other (these last being fewer but greater), the effect due to the invariable cause, as distinct from the variable ones, will not coincide with the average, but will be either below or above the average, whichever be the side on which the greatest number of the instances are found. This follows from a truth, ascertained both inductively and deductively, that small deviations from the true central point are greatly more frequent than large ones. The mathematical law is, "that the most probable determination of one or more invariable elements from observation is that in which the sum of the squares of the individual aberrations," or deviations, "shall be the least possible." See this principle stated, and its grounds popularly explained, by Sir John Herschel, in his review of Quetelet on Probabilities, Essays, pp. 395 et seq.
[17] Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités, fifth Paris Edition, p. 7.
[18] It even appears to me that the calculation of chances, where there are no data grounded either on special experience or on special inference, must, in an immense majority of cases, break down, from sheer impossibility of assigning any principle by which to be guided in setting out the list of possibilities. In the case of the coloured balls we have no difficulty in making the enumeration, because we ourselves determine what the possibilities shall be. But suppose a case more analogous to those which occur in nature: instead of three colours, let there be in the box all possible colours: we being supposed ignorant of the comparative frequency with which different colours occur in nature, or in the productions of art. How is the list of cases to be made out? Is every distinct shade to count as a colour? If so, is the test to be a common eye, or an educated eye, a painter's for instance? On the answer to these questions would depend whether the chances against some particular colour would be estimated at ten, twenty, or perhaps five hundred to one. While if we knew from experience that the particular colour occurs on an average a certain number of times in every hundred or thousand, we should not require to know anything either of the frequency or of the number of the other possibilities.
[19] Prospective Review for February 1850.
[20] "If this be not so, why do we feel so much more probability added by the first instance, than by any single subsequent instance? Why, except that the first instance gives us its possibility (a cause adequate to it), while every other only gives us the frequency of its conditions? If no reference to a cause be supposed, possibility would have no meaning; yet it is clear, that, antecedent to its happening, we might have supposed the event impossible, i.e., have believed that there was no physical energy really existing in the world equal to producing it.... After the first time of happening, which is, then, more important to the whole probability than any other single instance (because proving the possibility), the number of times becomes important as an index to the intensity or extent of the cause, and its independence of any particular time. If we took the case of a tremendous leap, for instance, and wished to form an estimate of the probability of its succeeding a certain number of times; the first instance, by showing its possibility (before doubtful) is of the most importance; but every succeeding leap shows the power to be more perfectly under control, greater and more invariable, and so increases the probability; and no one would think of reasoning in this case straight from one instance to the next, without referring to the physical energy which each leap indicated. Is it not then clear that we do not ever" (let us rather say, that we do not in an advanced state of our knowledge) "conclude directly from the happening of an event to the probability of its happening again; but that we refer to the cause, regarding the past cases as an index to the cause, and the cause as our guide to the future?"—Ibid.
[21] The writer last quoted says that the valuation of chances by comparing the number of cases in which the event occurs with the number in which it does not occur, "would generally be wholly erroneous," and "is not the true theory of probability." It is at least that which forms the foundation of insurance, and of all those calculations of chances in the business of life which experience so abundantly verifies. The reason which the reviewer gives for rejecting the theory, is that it "would regard an event as certain which had hitherto never failed; which is exceedingly far from the truth, even for a very large number of constant successes." This is not a defect in a particular theory, but in any theory of chances. No principle of evaluation can provide for such a case as that which the reviewer supposes. If an event has never once failed, in a number of trials sufficient to eliminate chance, it really has all the certainty which can be given by an empirical law: it is certain during the continuance of the same collocation of causes which existed during the observations. If it ever fails, it is in consequence of some change in that collocation. Now, no theory of chances will enable us to infer the future probability of an event from the past, if the causes in operation, capable of influencing the event, have intermediately undergone a change.
[22] Pp. 18, 19. The theorem is not stated by Laplace in the exact terms in which I have stated it; but the identity of import of the two modes of expression is easily demonstrable.
[23] For a fuller treatment of the many interesting questions raised by the theory of probabilities, I may now refer to a recent work by Mr. Venn, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, "The Logic of Chance;" one of the most thoughtful and philosophical treatises on any subject connected with Logic and Evidence, which have been produced in this or any other country for many years. Some criticisms contained in it have been very useful to me in revising the corresponding chapters of the present work. In several of Mr. Venn's opinions, however, I do not agree. What these are will be obvious to any reader of Mr. Venn's work who is also a reader of this.
[24] There was no greater foundation for this than for Newton's celebrated conjecture that the diamond was combustible. He grounded his guess on the very high refracting power of the diamond, comparatively to its density; a peculiarity which had been observed to exist in combustible substances; and on similar grounds he conjectured that water, though not combustible, contained a combustible ingredient. Experiment having subsequently shown that in both instances he guessed right, the prophecy is considered to have done great honour to his scientific sagacity; but it is to this day uncertain whether the guess was, in truth, what there are so many examples of in the history of science, a farsighted anticipation of a law afterwards to be discovered. The progress of science has not hitherto shown ground for believing that there is any real connexion between combustibility and a high refracting power.
[25] Hartley's Observations on Man, vol. i. p. 16. The passage is not in Priestley's curtailed edition.
[26] I am happy to be able to quote the following excellent passage from Mr. Baden Powell's Essay on the Inductive Philosophy, in confirmation, both in regard to history and to doctrine, of the statement made in the text. Speaking of the "conviction of the universal and permanent uniformity of nature," Mr. Powell says (pp. 98-100),
"We may remark that this idea, in its proper extent, is by no means one of popular acceptance or natural growth. Just so far as the daily experience of every one goes, so far indeed he comes to embrace a certain persuasion of this kind, but merely to this limited extent, that what is going on around him at present, in his own narrow sphere of observation, will go on in like manner in future. The peasant believes that the sun which rose to-day will rise again to-morrow; that the seed put into the ground will be followed in due time by the harvest this year as it was last year, and the like; but has no notion of such inferences in subjects beyond his immediate observation. And it should be observed that each class of persons, in admitting this belief within the limited range of his own experience, though he doubt or deny it in everything beyond, is, in fact, bearing unconscious testimony to its universal truth. Nor, again, is it only among the most ignorant that this limitation is put upon the truth. There is a very general propensity to believe that everything beyond common experience, or especially ascertained laws of nature, is left to the dominion of chance or fate or arbitrary intervention; and even to object to any attempted explanation by physical causes, if conjecturally thrown out for an apparently unaccountable phenomenon.
"The precise doctrine of the generalization of this idea of the uniformity of nature, so far from being obvious, natural, or intuitive, is utterly beyond the attainment of the many. In all the extent of its universality it is characteristic of the philosopher. It is clearly the result of philosophic cultivation and training, and by no means the spontaneous offspring of any primary principle naturally inherent in the mind, as some seem to believe. It is no mere vague persuasion taken up without examination, as a common prepossession to which we are always accustomed; on the contrary, all common prejudices and associations are against it. It is pre-eminently an acquired idea. It is not attained without deep study and reflection. The best informed philosopher is the man who most firmly believes it, even in opposition to received notions; its acceptance depends on the extent and profoundness of his inductive studies."
[27] Supra, book iii. ch. iii. § 1.
[28] It deserves remark, that these early generalizations did not, like scientific inductions, presuppose causation. What they did presuppose, was uniformity in physical facts. But the observers were as ready to presume uniformity in the coexistences of facts as in the sequences. On the other hand, they never thought of assuming that this uniformity was a principle pervading all nature: their generalizations did not imply that there was uniformity in everything, but only that as much uniformity as existed within their observation, existed also beyond it. The induction, Fire burns, does not require for its validity that all nature should observe uniform laws, but only that there should be uniformity in one particular class of natural phenomena: the effects of fire on the senses and on combustible substances. And uniformity to this extent was not assumed, anterior to the experience, but proved by the experience. The same observed instances which proved the narrower truth, proved as much of the wider one as corresponded to it. It is from losing sight of this fact, and considering the law of causation in its full extent as necessarily presupposed in the very earliest generalizations, that persons have been led into the belief that the law of causation is known à priori, and is not itself a conclusion from experience.
[29] Book ii. chap. iii.
[30] 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 similar 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 experience, 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 affording an assurance which experience cannot give, of the universality of those which it does contain. By abstraction M. Taine seems to think that we are able, not merely to analyse that part of nature which we see, and exhibit apart the elements which pervade it, but to distinguish such of them as are elements of the system of nature considered as a whole, not incidents belonging to our limited terrestrial experience. I am not sure that I fully enter into M. Taine's meaning; but I confess I do not see how any mere abstract conception, elicited by our minds from our experience, can be evidence of an objective fact in universal Nature, beyond what the experience itself bears witness of; or how, in the process of interpreting in general language the testimony of experience, the limitations of the testimony itself can be cast off.
[31] Book i. chap. vii.
[32] In some cases, a Kind is sufficiently identified by some one remarkable property: but most commonly several are required; each property considered singly, being a joint property of that and of other Kinds. The colour and brightness of the diamond are common to it with the paste from which false diamonds are made; its octohedral form is common to it with alum, and magnetic iron ore; but the colour and brightness and the form together, identify its Kind; that is, are a mark to us that it is combustible; that when burnt it produces carbonic acid; that it cannot be cut with any known substance; together with many other ascertained properties, and the fact that there exist an indefinite number still unascertained.
[33] This doctrine of course assumes that the allotropic forms of what is chemically the same substance are so many different Kinds; and such, in the sense in which the word Kind is used in this treatise, they really are.
[34] Mr. De Morgan, in his Formal Logic, makes the just remark, that from two such premises as Most A are B, and Most A are C, we may infer with certainty that some B are C. But this is the utmost limit of the conclusions which can be drawn from two approximate generalizations, when the precise degree of their approximation to universality is unknown or undefined.
[35] Rationale of Judicial Evidence, vol. iii. p. 224.
[36] Supra, vol. i. p. 115.
[37] Supra, book i. ch. v. § 1, and book ii. ch. v. § 5.
[38] The axiom, "Equals subtracted from equals leave equal differences," may be demonstrated from the two axioms in the text. If A = a and B = b, A - B = a - b. For if not, let A - B = a - b + c. Then since B = b, adding equals to equals, A = a + c. But A = a. Therefore a = a + c, which is impossible.
This proposition having been demonstrated, we may, by means of it, demonstrate the following: "If equals be added to unequals, the sums are unequal." If A = a and B not = b, A + B is not = a + b. For suppose it be so. Then, since A = a and A + B = a + b, subtracting equals from equals, B = b; which is contrary to the hypothesis.
So again, it may be proved that two things, one of which is equal and the other unequal to a third thing, are unequal to one another. If A = a and A not = B, neither is a = B. For suppose it to be equal. Then since A = a and a = B, and since things equal to the same thing are equal to one another, A = B: which is contrary to the hypothesis.
[39] Geometers have usually preferred to define parallel lines by the property of being in the same plane and never meeting. This, however, has rendered it necessary for them to assume, as an additional axiom, some other property of parallel lines; and the unsatisfactory manner in which properties for that purpose have been selected by Euclid and others has always been deemed the opprobrium of elementary geometry. Even as a verbal definition, equidistance is a fitter property to characterize parallels by, since it is the attribute really involved in the signification of the name. If to be in the same plane and never to meet were all that is meant by being parallel, we should feel no incongruity in speaking of a curve as parallel to its asymptote. The meaning of parallel lines is, lines which pursue exactly the same direction, and which, therefore, neither draw nearer nor go farther from one another; a conception suggested at once by the contemplation of nature. That the lines will never meet is of course included in the more comprehensive proposition that they are everywhere equally distant. And that any straight lines which are in the same plane and not equidistant will certainly meet, may be demonstrated in the most rigorous manner from the fundamental property of straight lines assumed in the text, viz. that if they set out from the same point, they diverge more and more without limit.
[40] Philosophie Positive, iii. 414-416.
[41] See the two remarkable notes (A) and (F), appended to his Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect.
[43] A writer to whom I have several times referred, gives as the definition of an impossibility, that which there exists in the world no cause adequate to produce. This definition does not take in such impossibilities as these—that two and two should make five; that two straight lines should inclose a space; or that anything should begin to exist without a cause. I can think of no definition of impossibility comprehensive enough to include all its varieties, except the one which I have given: viz. An impossibility is that, the truth of which would conflict with a complete induction, that is, with the most conclusive evidence which we possess of universal truth.
As to the reputed impossibilities which rest on no other grounds than our ignorance of any cause capable of producing the supposed effects; very few of them are certainly impossible, or permanently incredible. The facts of travelling seventy miles an hour, painless surgical operations, and conversing by instantaneous signals between London and New York, held a high place, not many years ago, among such impossibilities.
[44] Not, however, as might at first sight appear, 999 times as much. A complete analysis of the cases shows that (always assuming the veracity of the witness to be 9/10) in 10,000 drawings, the drawing of No. 79 will occur nine times, and be announced incorrectly once; the credibility therefore of the announcement of No. 79 is 9/10; while the drawing of a white ball will occur nine times, and be announced incorrectly 999 times. The credibility therefore of the announcement of white is 9/1008, and the ratio of the two 1008:10; the one announcement being thus only about a hundred times more credible than the other, instead of 999 times.
BOOK IV.
OF OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION.
"Clear and distinct ideas are terms which, though familiar and frequent in men's mouths, I have reason to think every one who uses does not perfectly understand. And possibly it is but here and there one who gives himself the trouble to consider them so far as to know what he himself or others precisely mean by them; I have, therefore, in most places, chose to put determinate or determined, instead of clear and distinct, as more likely to direct men's thoughts to my meaning in this matter."—Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding; Epistle to the Reader.
"Il ne peut y avoir qu'une méthode parfaite, qui est la méthode naturelle; on nomme ainsi un arrangement dans lequel les êtres du même genre seraient plus voisins entre eux que ceux de tous les autres genres; les genres du même ordre, plus que ceux de tous les autres ordres; et ainsi de suite. Cette méthode est l'idéal auquel l'histoire naturelle doit tendre; car il est évident que si l'on y parvenait, l'on aurait l'expression exacte et complète de la nature entière."—Cuvier, Règne Animal, Introduction.
"Deux grandes notions philosophiques dominent la théorie fondamentale de la méthode naturelle proprement dite, savoir la formation des groupes naturels, et ensuite leur succession hiérarchique."—Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive, 42me leçon.
CHAPTER I.
OF OBSERVATION AND DESCRIPTION.
§ 1. The inquiry which occupied us in the two preceding books, has conducted us to what appears a satisfactory solution of the principal problem of Logic, according to the conception I have formed of the science. We have found, that the mental process with which Logic is conversant, the operation of ascertaining truths by means of evidence, is always, even when appearances point to a different theory of it, a process of induction. And we have particularized the various modes of induction, and obtained a clear view of the principles to which it must conform, in order to lead to results which can be relied on.
The consideration of Induction, however, does not end with the direct rules for its performance. Something must be said of those other operations of the mind, which are either necessarily presupposed in all induction, or are instrumental to the more difficult and complicated inductive processes. The present book will be devoted to the consideration of these subsidiary operations: among which our attention must first be given to those, which are indispensable preliminaries to all induction whatsoever.
Induction being merely the extension to a class of cases, of something which has been observed to be true in certain individual instances of the class; the first place among the operations subsidiary to induction, is claimed by Observation. This is not, however, the place to lay down rules for making good observers; nor is it within the competence of Logic to do so, but of the art of intellectual Education. Our business with observation is only in its connexion with the appropriate problem of logic, the estimation of evidence. We have to consider, not how or what to observe, but under what conditions observation is to be relied on; what is needful, in order that the fact, supposed to be observed, may safely be received as true.
§ 2. The answer to this question is very simple, at least in its first aspect. The sole condition is, that what is supposed to have been observed shall really have been observed; that it be an observation, not an inference. For in almost every act of our perceiving faculties, observation and inference are intimately blended. What we are said to observe is usually a compound result, of which one-tenth may be observation, and the remaining nine-tenths inference.
I affirm, for example, that I hear a man's voice. This would pass, in common language, for a direct perception. All, however, which is really perception, is that I hear a sound. That the sound is a voice, and that voice the voice of a man, are not perceptions but inferences. I affirm, again, that I saw my brother at a certain hour this morning. If any proposition concerning a matter of fact would commonly be said to be known by the direct testimony of the senses, this surely would be so. The truth, however, is far otherwise. I only saw a certain coloured surface; or rather I had the kind of visual sensations which are usually produced by a coloured surface; and from these as marks, known to be such by previous experience, I concluded that I saw my brother. I might have had sensations precisely similar, when my brother was not there. I might have seen some other person so nearly resembling him in appearance, as, at the distance, and with the degree of attention which I bestowed, to be mistaken for him. I might have been asleep, and have dreamed that I saw him; or in a state of nervous disorder, which brought his image before me in a waking hallucination. In all these modes, many have been led to believe that they saw persons well known to them, who were dead or far distant. If any of these suppositions had been true, the affirmation that I saw my brother would have been erroneous; but whatever was matter of direct perception, namely the visual sensations, would have been real. The inference only would have been ill grounded; I should have ascribed those sensations to a wrong cause.
Innumerable instances might be given, and analysed in the same manner, of what are vulgarly called errors of sense. There are none of them properly errors of sense; they are erroneous inferences from sense. When I look at a candle through a multiplying glass, I see what seems a dozen candles instead of one: and if the real circumstances of the case were skilfully disguised, I might suppose that there were really that number; there would be what is called an optical deception. In the kaleidoscope there really is that deception: when I look through the instrument, instead of what is actually there, namely a casual arrangement of coloured fragments, the appearance presented is that of the same combination several times repeated in symmetrical arrangement round a point. The delusion is of course effected by giving me the same sensations which I should have had if such a symmetrical combination had really been presented to me. If I cross two of my fingers, and bring any small object, a marble for instance, into contact with both, at points not usually touched simultaneously by one object, I can hardly, if my eyes are shut, help believing that there are two marbles instead of one. But it is not my touch in this case, nor my sight in the other, which is deceived; the deception, whether durable or only momentary, is in my judgment. From my senses I have only the sensations, and those are genuine. Being accustomed to have those or similar sensations when, and only when, a certain arrangement of outward objects is present to my organs, I have the habit of instantly, when I experience the sensations, inferring the existence of that state of outward things. This habit has become so powerful, that the inference, performed with the speed and certainty of an instinct, is confounded with intuitive perceptions. When it is correct, I am unconscious that it ever needed proof; even when I know it to be incorrect, I cannot without considerable effort abstain from making it. In order to be aware that it is not made by instinct but by an acquired habit, I am obliged to reflect on the slow process through which I learnt to judge by the eye of many things which I now appear to perceive directly by sight; and on the reverse operation performed by persons learning to draw, who with difficulty and labour divest themselves of their acquired perceptions, and learn afresh to see things as they appear to the eye.
It would be easy to prolong these illustrations, were there any need to expatiate on a topic so copiously exemplified in various popular works. From the examples already given, it is seen sufficiently, that the individual facts from which we collect our inductive generalizations are scarcely ever obtained by observation alone. Observation extends only to the sensations by which we recognise objects; but the propositions which we make use of, either in science or in common life, relate mostly to the objects themselves. In every act of what is called observation, there is at least one inference—from the sensations to the presence of the object; from the marks or diagnostics, to the entire phenomenon. And hence, among other consequences, follows the seeming paradox, that a general proposition collected from particulars is often more certainly true than any one of the particular propositions from which, by an act of induction, it was inferred. For, each of those particular (or rather singular) propositions involved an inference, from the impression on the senses to the fact which caused that impression: and this inference may have been erroneous in any one of the instances, but cannot well have been erroneous in all of them, provided their number was sufficient to eliminate chance. The conclusion, therefore, that is, the general proposition, may deserve more complete reliance than it would be safe to repose in any one of the inductive premises.
The logic of observation, then, consists solely in a correct discrimination between that, in a result of observation, which has really been perceived, and that which is an inference from the perception. Whatever portion is inference, is amenable to the rules of induction already treated of, and requires no further notice here: the question for us in this place is, when all which is inference is taken away, what remains. There remains, in the first place, the mind's own feelings or states of consciousness, namely, its outward feelings or sensations, and its inward feelings—its thoughts, emotions, and volitions. Whether anything else remains, or all else is inference from this; whether the mind is capable of directly perceiving or apprehending anything except states of its own consciousness—is a problem of metaphysics not to be discussed in this place. But after excluding all questions on which metaphysicians differ, it remains true, that for most purposes the discrimination we are called upon practically to exercise is that between sensations or other feelings, of our own or of other people, and inferences drawn from them. And on the theory of Observation this is all which seems necessary to be said for the purposes of the present work.
§ 3. If, in the simplest observation, or in what passes for such, there is a large part which is not observation but something else; so in the simplest description of an observation, there is, and must always be, much more asserted than is contained in the perception itself. We cannot describe a fact, without implying more than the fact. The perception is only of one individual thing; but to describe it is to affirm a connexion between it and every other thing which is either denoted or connoted by any of the terms used. To begin with an example, than which none can be conceived more elementary: I have a sensation of sight, and I endeavour to describe it by saying that I see something white. In saying this, I do not solely affirm my sensation; I also class it. I assert a resemblance between the thing I see, and all things which I and others are accustomed to call white. I assert that it resembles them in the circumstance in which they all resemble one another, in that which is the ground of their being called by the name. This is not merely one way of describing an observation, but the only way. If I would either register my observation for my own future use, or make it known for the benefit of others, I must assert a resemblance between the fact which I have observed and something else. It is inherent in a description, to be the statement of a resemblance, or resemblances.
We thus see that it is impossible to express in words any result of observation, without performing an act possessing what Dr. Whewell considers to be characteristic of Induction. There is always something introduced which was not included in the observation itself; some conception common to the phenomenon with other phenomena to which it is compared. An observation cannot be spoken of in language at all without declaring more than that one observation; without assimilating it to other phenomena already observed and classified. But this identification of an object—this recognition of it as possessing certain known characteristics—has never been confounded with Induction. It is an operation which precedes all induction, and supplies it with its materials. It is a perception of resemblances, obtained by comparison.
These resemblances are not always apprehended directly, by merely comparing the object observed with some other present object, or with our recollection of an object which is absent. They are often ascertained through intermediate marks, that is, deductively. In describing some new kind of animal, suppose me to say that it measures ten feet in length, from the forehead to the extremity of the tail. I did not ascertain this by the unassisted eye. I had a two-foot rule which I applied to the object, and, as we commonly say, measured it; an operation which was not wholly manual, but partly also mathematical, involving the two propositions, Five times two is ten, and Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. Hence, the fact that the animal is ten feet long is not an immediate perception, but a conclusion from reasoning; the minor premises alone being furnished by observation of the object. Nevertheless, this is called an observation or a description of the animal, not an induction respecting it.
To pass at once from a very simple to a very complex example: I affirm that the earth is globular. The assertion is not grounded on direct perception; for the figure of the earth cannot, by us, be directly perceived, though the assertion would not be true unless circumstances could be supposed under which its truth could be so perceived. That the form of the earth is globular is inferred from certain marks, as for instance from this, that its shadow thrown upon the moon is circular; or this, that on the sea, or any extensive plain, our horizon is always a circle; either of which marks is incompatible with any other than a globular form. I assert further, that the earth is that particular kind of globe which is termed an oblate spheroid; because it is found by measurement in the direction of the meridian, that the length on the surface of the earth which subtends a given angle at its centre, diminishes as we recede from the equator and approach the poles. But these propositions, that the earth is globular, and that it is an oblate spheroid, assert, each of them, an individual fact; in its own nature capable of being perceived by the senses when the requisite organs and the necessary position are supposed, and only not actually perceived because those organs and that position are wanting. This identification of the earth, first as a globe, and next as an oblate spheroid, which, if the fact could have been seen, would have been called a description of the figure of the earth, may without impropriety be so called when, instead of being seen, it is inferred. But we could not without impropriety call either of these assertions an induction from facts respecting the earth. They are not general propositions collected from particular facts, but particular facts deduced from general propositions. They are conclusions obtained deductively, from premises originating in induction: but of these premises some were not obtained by observation of the earth, nor had any peculiar reference to it.
If, then, the truth respecting the figure of the earth is not an induction, why should the truth respecting the figure of the earth's orbit be so? The two cases only differ in this, that the form of the orbit was not, like the form of the earth itself, deduced by ratiocination from facts which were marks of ellipticity, but was got at by boldly guessing that the path was an ellipse, and finding afterwards, on examination, that the observations were in harmony with the hypothesis. According to Dr. Whewell, however, this process of guessing and verifying our guesses is not only induction, but the whole of induction: no other exposition can be given of that logical operation. That he is wrong in the latter assertion, the whole of the preceding book has, I hope, sufficiently proved; and that the process by which the ellipticity of the planetary orbits was ascertained, is not induction at all, was attempted to be shown in the second chapter of the same book.[1] We are now, however, prepared to go more into the heart of the matter than at that earlier period of our inquiry, and to show, not merely what the operation in question is not, but what it is.
§ 4. We observed, in the second chapter, that the proposition "the earth moves in an ellipse," so far as it only serves for the colligation or connecting together of actual observations, (that is, as it only affirms that the observed positions of the earth may be correctly represented by as many points in the circumference of an imaginary ellipse,) is not an induction, but a description: it is an induction, only when it affirms that the intermediate positions, of which there has been no direct observation, would be found to correspond to the remaining points of the same elliptic circumference. Now, though this real induction is one thing, and the description another, we are in a very different condition for making the induction before we have obtained the description, and after it. For inasmuch as the description, like all other descriptions, contains the assertion of a resemblance between the phenomenon described and something else; in pointing out something which the series of observed places of a planet resembles, it points out something in which the several places themselves agree. If the series of places correspond to as many points of an ellipse, the places themselves agree in being situated in that ellipse. We have, therefore, by the same process which gave us the description, obtained the requisites for an induction by the Method of Agreement. The successive observed places of the earth being considered as effects, and its motion as the cause which produces them, we find that those effects, that is, those places, agree in the circumstance of being in an ellipse. We conclude that the remaining effects, the places which have not been observed, agree in the same circumstance, and that the law of the motion of the earth is motion in an ellipse.
The Colligation of Facts, therefore, by means of hypotheses, or, as Dr. Whewell prefers to say, by means of Conceptions, instead of being, as he supposes, Induction itself, takes its proper place among operations subsidiary to Induction. All Induction supposes that we have previously compared the requisite number of individual instances, and ascertained in what circumstances they agree. The Colligation of Facts is no other than this preliminary operation. When Kepler, after vainly endeavouring to connect the observed places of a planet by various hypotheses of circular motion, at last tried the hypothesis of an ellipse and found it answer to the phenomena; what he really attempted, first unsuccessfully and at last successfully, was to discover the circumstance in which all the observed positions of the planet agreed. And when he in like manner connected another set of observed facts, the periodic times of the different planets, by the proposition that the squares of the times are proportional to the cubes of the distances, what he did was simply to ascertain the property in which the periodic times of all the different planets agreed.
Since, therefore, all that is true and to the purpose in Dr. Whewell's doctrine of Conceptions might be fully expressed by the more familiar term Hypothesis; and since his Colligation of Facts by means of appropriate Conceptions, is but the ordinary process of finding by a comparison of phenomena, in what consists their agreement or resemblance; I would willingly have confined myself to those better understood expressions, and persevered to the end in the same abstinence which I have hitherto observed from ideological discussions; considering the mechanism of our thoughts to be a topic distinct from and irrelevant to the principles and rules by which the trustworthiness of the results of thinking is to be estimated. Since, however, a work of such high pretensions, and, it must also be said, of so much real merit, has rested the whole theory of Induction upon such ideological considerations, it seems necessary for others who follow, to claim for themselves and their doctrines whatever position may properly belong to them on the same metaphysical ground. And this is the object of the succeeding chapter.
CHAPTER II.
OF ABSTRACTION, OR THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTIONS.
§ 1. The metaphysical inquiry into the nature and composition of what have been called Abstract Ideas, or in other words, of the notions which answer in the mind to classes and to general names, belongs not to Logic, but to a different science, and our purpose does not require that we should enter upon it here. We are only concerned with the universally acknowledged fact, that such notions or conceptions do exist. The mind can conceive a multitude of individual things as one assemblage or class; and general names do really suggest to us certain ideas or mental representations, otherwise we could not use the names with consciousness of a meaning. Whether the idea called up by a general name is composed of the various circumstances in which all the individuals denoted by the name agree, and of no others, (which is the doctrine of Locke, Brown, and the Conceptualists;) or whether it be the idea of some one of those individuals, clothed in its individualizing peculiarities, but with the accompanying knowledge that those peculiarities are not properties of the class, (which is the doctrine of Berkeley, Mr. Bailey,[2] and the modern Nominalists;) or whether (as held by Mr. James Mill) the idea of the class is that of a miscellaneous assemblage of individuals belonging to the class; or whether, finally, (what appears to be the truest opinion,) it be any one or any other of all these, according to the accidental circumstances of the case; certain it is, that some idea or mental conception is suggested by a general name, whenever we either hear it or employ it with consciousness of a meaning. And this, which we may call if we please a general idea, represents in our minds the whole class of things to which the name is applied. Whenever we think or reason concerning the class, we do so by means of this idea. And the voluntary power which the mind has, of attending to one part of what is present to it at any moment, and neglecting another part, enables us to keep our reasonings and conclusions respecting the class unaffected by anything in the idea or mental image which is not really, or at least which we do not really believe to be, common to the whole class.[3]
There are, then, such things as general conceptions, or conceptions by means of which we can think generally: and when we form a set of phenomena into a class, that is, when we compare them with one another to ascertain in what they agree, some general conception is implied in this mental operation. And inasmuch as such a comparison is a necessary preliminary to Induction, it is most true that Induction could not go on without general conceptions.
§ 2. But it does not therefore follow that these general conceptions must have existed in the mind previously to the comparison. It is not a law of our intellect, that in comparing things with each other and taking note of their agreement we merely recognise as realized in the outward world something that we already had in our minds. The conception originally found its way to us as the result of such a comparison. It was obtained (in metaphysical phrase) by abstraction from individual things. These things may be things which we perceived or thought of on former occasions, but they may also be the things which we are perceiving or thinking of on the very occasion. When Kepler compared the observed places of the planet Mars, and found that they agreed in being points of an elliptic circumference, he applied a general conception which was already in his mind, having been derived from his former experience. But this is by no means universally the case. When we compare several objects and find them to agree in being white, or when we compare the various species of ruminating animals and find them to agree in being cloven-footed, we have just as much a general conception in our minds as Kepler had in his: we have the conception of "a white thing," or the conception of "a cloven-footed animal." But no one supposes that we necessarily bring these conceptions with us, and superinduce them (to adopt Dr. Whewell's expression) upon the facts: because in these simple cases everybody sees that the very act of comparison which ends in our connecting the facts by means of the conception, may be the source from which we derive the conception itself. If we had never seen any white object or had never seen any cloven-footed animal before, we should at the same time and by the same mental act acquire the idea, and employ it for the colligation of the observed phenomena. Kepler, on the contrary, really had to bring the idea with him, and superinduce it upon the facts; he could not evolve it out of them: if he had not already had the idea, he would not have been able to acquire it by a comparison of the planet's positions. But this inability was a mere accident: the idea of an ellipse could have been acquired from the paths of the planets as effectually as from anything else, if the paths had not happened to be invisible. If the planet had left a visible track, and we had been so placed that we could see it at the proper angle, we might have abstracted our original idea of an ellipse from the planetary orbit. Indeed, every conception which can be made the instrument for connecting a set of facts, might have been originally evolved from those very facts. The conception is a conception of something; and that which it is a conception of, is really in the facts, and might, under some supposable circumstances, or by some supposable extension of the faculties which we actually possess, have been detected in them. And not only is this always in itself possible, but it actually happens, in almost all cases in which the obtaining of the right conception is a matter of any considerable difficulty. For if there be no new conception required; if one of those already familiar to mankind will serve the purpose, the accident of being the first to whom the right one occurs, may happen to almost anybody; at least in the case of a set of phenomena which the whole scientific world are engaged in attempting to connect. The honour, in Kepler's case, was that of the accurate, patient, and toilsome calculations by which he compared the results that followed from his different guesses, with the observations of Tycho Brahe; but the merit was very small of guessing an ellipse; the only wonder is that men had not guessed it before, nor could they have failed to do so if there had not existed an obstinate à priori prejudice that the heavenly bodies must move, if not in a circle, in some combination of circles.
The really difficult cases are those in which the conception destined to create light and order out of darkness and confusion, has to be sought for among the very phenomena which it afterwards serves to arrange. Why, according to Dr. Whewell himself, did the ancients fail in discovering the laws of mechanics, that is, of equilibrium and of the communication of motion? Because they had not, or at least had not clearly, the ideas or conceptions of pressure and resistance, momentum, and uniform and accelerating force. And whence could they have obtained these ideas, except from the very facts of equilibrium and motion? The tardy development of several of the physical sciences, for example of optics, electricity, magnetism, and the higher generalizations of chemistry, he ascribes to the fact that mankind had not yet possessed themselves of the Idea of Polarity, that is, the idea of opposite properties in opposite directions. But what was there to suggest such an idea, until, by a separate examination of several of these different branches of knowledge, it was shown that the facts of each of them did present, in some instances at least, the curious phenomenon of opposite properties in opposite directions? The thing was superficially manifest only in two cases, those of the magnet, and of electrified bodies; and there the conception was encumbered with the circumstance of material poles, or fixed points in the body itself, in which points this opposition of properties seemed to be inherent. The first comparison and abstraction had led only to this conception of poles; and if anything corresponding to that conception had existed in the phenomena of chemistry or optics, the difficulty now justly considered so great, would have been extremely small. The obscurity rose from the fact, that the polarities in chemistry and optics were distinct species, though of the same genus, with the polarities in electricity and magnetism: and that in order to assimilate the phenomena to one another, it was necessary to compare a polarity without poles, such for instance as is exemplified in the polarization of light, and the polarity with (apparent) poles, which we see in the magnet; and to recognise that these polarities, while different in many other respects, agree in the one character which is expressed by the phrase, opposite properties in opposite directions. From the result of such a comparison it was that the minds of scientific men formed this new general conception: between which, and the first confused feeling of an analogy between some of the phenomena of light and those of electricity and magnetism, there is a long interval, filled up by the labours and more or less sagacious suggestions of many superior minds.
The conceptions, then, which we employ for the colligation and methodization of facts, do not develop themselves from within, but are impressed upon the mind from without; they are never obtained otherwise than by way of comparison and abstraction, and, in the most important and the most numerous cases, are evolved by abstraction from the very phenomena which it is their office to colligate. I am far, however, from wishing to imply that it is not often a very difficult thing to perform this process of abstraction well, or that the success of an inductive operation does not, in many cases, principally depend on the skill with which we perform it. Bacon was quite justified in designating as one of the principal obstacles to good induction, general conceptions wrongly formed, "notiones temerè à rebus abstractæ:" to which Dr. Whewell adds, that not only does bad abstraction make bad induction, but that in order to perform induction well, we must have abstracted well; our general conceptions must be "clear" and "appropriate" to the matter in hand.
§ 3. In attempting to show what the difficulty in this matter really is, and how it is surmounted, I must beg the reader, once for all, to bear this in mind; that although in discussing the opinions of a different school of philosophy, I am willing to adopt their language, and to speak, therefore, of connecting facts through the instrumentality of a conception, this technical phraseology means neither more nor less than what is commonly called comparing the facts with one another and determining in what they agree. Nor has the technical expression even the advantage of being metaphysically correct. The facts are not connected, except in a merely metaphorical acceptation of the term. The ideas of the facts may become connected, that is, we may be led to think of them together; but this consequence is no more than what may be produced by any casual association. What really takes place, is, I conceive, more philosophically expressed by the common word Comparison, than by the phrases "to connect" or "to superinduce." For, as the general conception is itself obtained by a comparison of particular phenomena, so, when obtained, the mode in which we apply it to other phenomena is again by comparison. We compare phenomena with each other to get the conception, and we then compare those and other phenomena with the conception. We get the conception of an animal (for instance) by comparing different animals, and when we afterwards see a creature resembling an animal, we compare it with our general conception of an animal; and if it agrees with that general conception, we include it in the class. The conception becomes the type of comparison.
And we need only consider what comparison is, to see that where the objects are more than two, and still more when they are an indefinite number, a type of some sort is an indispensable condition of the comparison. When we have to arrange and classify a great number of objects according to their agreements and differences, we do not make a confused attempt to compare all with all. We know that two things are as much as the mind can easily attend to at a time, and we therefore fix upon one of the objects, either at hazard or because it offers in a peculiarly striking manner some important character, and, taking this as our standard, compare it with one object after another. If we find a second object which presents a remarkable agreement with the first, inducing us to class them together, the question instantly arises, in what particular circumstances do they agree? and to take notice of these circumstances is already a first stage of abstraction, giving rise to a general conception. Having advanced thus far, when we now take in hand a third object we naturally ask ourselves the question, not merely whether this third object agrees with the first, but whether it agrees with it in the same circumstances in which the second did? in other words, whether it agrees with the general conception which has been obtained by abstraction from the first and second? Thus we see the tendency of general conceptions, as soon as formed, to substitute themselves as types, for whatever individual objects previously answered that purpose in our comparisons. We may, perhaps, find that no considerable number of other objects agree with this first general conception; and that we must drop the conception, and beginning again with a different individual case, proceed by fresh comparisons to a different general conception. Sometimes, again, we find that the same conception will serve, by merely leaving out some of its circumstances; and by this higher effort of abstraction, we obtain a still more general conception; as in the case formerly referred to, the scientific world rose from the conception of poles to the general conception of opposite properties in opposite directions; or as those South-Sea islanders, whose conception of a quadruped had been abstracted from hogs (the only animals of that description which they had seen), when they afterwards compared that conception with other quadrupeds, dropped some of the circumstances, and arrived at the more general conception which Europeans associate with the term.
These brief remarks contain, I believe, all that is well-grounded in the doctrine, that the conception by which the mind arranges and gives unity to phenomena must be furnished by the mind itself, and that we find the right conception by a tentative process, trying first one and then another until we hit the mark. The conception is not furnished by the mind until it has been furnished to the mind; and the facts which supply it are sometimes extraneous facts, but more often the very facts which we are attempting to arrange by it. It is quite true, however, that in endeavouring to arrange the facts, at whatever point we begin, we never advance three steps without forming a general conception, more or less distinct and precise; and that this general conception becomes the clue which we instantly endeavour to trace through the rest of the facts, or rather, becomes the standard with which we thenceforth compare them. If we are not satisfied with the agreements which we discover among the phenomena by comparing them with this type, or with some still more general conception which by an additional stage of abstraction we can form from the type; we change our path, and look out for other agreements: we recommence the comparison from a different starting-point, and so generate a different set of general conceptions. This is the tentative process which Dr. Whewell speaks of; and which has not unnaturally suggested the theory, that the conception is supplied by the mind itself: since the different conceptions which the mind successively tries, it either already possessed from its previous experience, or they were supplied to it in the first stage of the corresponding act of comparison; so that, in the subsequent part of the process, the conception manifested itself as something compared with the phenomena, not evolved from them.
§ 4. If this be a correct account of the instrumentality of general conceptions in the comparison which necessarily precedes Induction, we shall easily be able to translate into our own language what Dr. Whewell means by saying that conceptions, to be subservient to Induction, must be "clear" and "appropriate."
If the conception corresponds to a real agreement among the phenomena; if the comparison which we have made of a set of objects has led us to class them according to real resemblances and differences; the conception which does this cannot fail to be appropriate, for some purpose or other. The question of appropriateness is relative to the particular object we have in view. As soon as, by our comparison, we have ascertained some agreement, something which can be predicated in common of a number of objects; we have obtained a basis on which an inductive process is capable of being founded. But the agreements, or the ulterior consequences to which those agreements lead, may be of very different degrees of importance. If, for instance, we only compare animals according to their colour, and class those together which are coloured alike, we form the general conceptions of a white animal, a black animal, &c., which are conceptions legitimately formed; and if an induction were to be attempted concerning the causes of the colours of animals, this comparison would be the proper and necessary preparation for such an induction, but would not help us towards a knowledge of the laws of any other of the properties of animals: while if, with Cuvier, we compare and class them according to the structure of the skeleton, or, with Blainville, according to the nature of their outward integuments, the agreements and differences which are observable in these respects are not only of much greater importance in themselves, but are marks of agreements and differences in many other important particulars of the structure and mode of life of the animals. If, therefore, the study of their structure and habits be our object, the conceptions generated by these last comparisons are far more "appropriate" than those generated by the former. Nothing, other than this, can be meant by the appropriateness of a conception.
When Dr. Whewell says that the ancients, or the schoolmen, or any modern inquirers, missed discovering the real law of a phenomenon because they applied to it an inappropriate instead of an appropriate conception; he can only mean that in comparing various instances of the phenomenon, to ascertain in what those instances agreed, they missed the important points of agreement; and fastened upon such as were either imaginary, and not agreements at all, or if real agreements, were comparatively trifling, and had no connexion with the phenomenon, the law of which was sought.
§ 3. As, however, there is scarcely any one of the principles of a true method of philosophizing which does not require to be guarded against errors on both sides, I must enter a caveat against another misapprehension, of a kind directly contrary to the preceding. M. Comte, among other occasions on which he has condemned, with some asperity, any attempt to explain phenomena which are "evidently primordial," (meaning, apparently, no more than that every peculiar phenomenon must have at least one peculiar and therefore inexplicable law,) has spoken of the attempt to furnish any explanation of the colour belonging to each substance, "la couleur élémentaire propre à chaque substance," as essentially illusory. "No one," says he, "in our time attempts to explain the particular specific gravity of each substance or of each structure. Why should it be otherwise as to the specific colour, the notion of which is undoubtedly no less primordial?"[1]
[1] Supra, book iii. ch. ii. § 3, 4, 5.
But there is no need to speculate on what might be, when we have positive and certain knowledge of what has been. It is not true as a matter of fact, that mankind have always believed that all the successions of events were uniform and according to fixed laws. The Greek philosophers, not even excepting Aristotle, recognised Chance and Spontaneity (τύχη and τὸ αὐτομάτον) as among the agents in nature; in other words, they believed that to that extent there was no guarantee that the past had been similar to itself, or that the future would resemble the past. Even now a full half of the philosophical world, including the very same metaphysicians who contend most for the instinctive character of the belief in uniformity, consider one important class of phenomena, volitions, to be an exception to the uniformity, and not governed by a fixed law.[26]
A mode of concluding from experience must be pronounced untrustworthy, when subsequent experience refuses to confirm it. According to this criterion, induction by simple enumeration—in other words, generalization of an observed fact from the mere absence of any known instance to the contrary—affords in general a precarious and unsafe ground of assurance; for such generalizations are incessantly discovered, on further experience, to be false. Still, however, it affords some assurance, sufficient, in many cases, for the ordinary guidance of conduct. It would be absurd to say, that the generalizations arrived at by mankind in the outset of their experience, such as these, Food nourishes, Fire burns, Water drowns, were unworthy of reliance.[28] There is a scale of trustworthiness in the results of the original unscientific Induction; and on this diversity (as observed in the fourth chapter of the present book) depend the rules for the improvement of the process. The improvement consists in correcting one of these inartificial generalizations by means of another. As has been already pointed out, this is all that art can do. To test a generalization, by showing that it either follows from, or conflicts with, some stronger induction, some generalization resting on a broader foundation of experience, is the beginning and end of the logic of Induction.
§ 1. Considering then as empirical laws only those observed uniformities respecting which the question whether they are laws of causation must remain undecided until they can be explained deductively, or until some means are found of applying the Method of Difference to the case, it has been shown in the preceding chapter, that until an uniformity can, in one or the other of these modes, be taken out of the class of empirical laws, and brought either into that of laws of causation or of the demonstrated results of laws of causation, it cannot with any assurance be pronounced true beyond the local and other limits within which it has been found so by actual observation. It remains to consider how we are to assure ourselves of its truth even within those limits; after what quantity of experience a generalization which rests solely on the Method of Agreement, can be considered sufficiently established, even as an empirical law. In a former chapter, when treating of the Methods of Direct Induction, we expressly reserved this question,[15] and the time is now come for endeavouring to solve it.
An undue extension of this remark induced Locke to consider reasoning itself as nothing but the comparison of two ideas through the medium of a third, and knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas: doctrines which the Condillac school blindly adopted, without the qualifications and distinctions with which they were studiously guarded by their illustrious author. Where, indeed, the agreement or disagreement (otherwise called resemblance or dissimilarity) of any two things is the very matter to be determined, as is the case particularly in the sciences of quantity and extension; there, the process by which a solution, if not attainable by direct perception, must be indirectly sought, consists in comparing these two things through the medium of a third. But this is far from being true of all inquiries. The knowledge that bodies fall to the ground is not a perception of agreement or disagreement, but of a series of physical occurrences, a succession of sensations. Locke's definitions of knowledge and of reasoning required to be limited to our knowledge of, and reasoning about, resemblances. Nor, even when thus restricted, are the propositions strictly correct; since the comparison is not made, as he represents, between the ideas of the two phenomena, but between the phenomena themselves. This mistake has been pointed out in an earlier part of our inquiry,[37] and we traced it to an imperfect conception of what takes place in mathematics, where very often the comparison is really made between the ideas, without any appeal to the outward senses; only, however, because in mathematics a comparison of the ideas is strictly equivalent to a comparison of the phenomena themselves. Where, as in the case of numbers, lines, and figures, our idea of an object is a complete picture of the object, so far as respects the matter in hand; we can, of course, learn from the picture, whatever could be learnt from the object itself by mere contemplation of it as it exists at the particular instant when the picture is taken. No mere contemplation of gunpowder would ever teach us that a spark would make it explode, nor, consequently, would the contemplation of the idea of gunpowder do so: but the mere contemplation of a straight line shows that it cannot inclose a space: accordingly the contemplation of the idea of it will show the same. What takes place in mathematics is thus no argument that the comparison is between the ideas only. It is always, either indirectly or directly, a comparison of the phenomena.
Is it, then, never allowable, in a scientific hypothesis, to assume a cause; but only to ascribe an assumed law to a known cause? I do not assert this. I only say, that in the latter case alone can the hypothesis be received as true merely because it explains the phenomena: in the former case it is only useful by suggesting a line of investigation which may possibly terminate in obtaining real proof. For this purpose, as is justly remarked by M. Comte, it is indispensable that the cause suggested by the hypothesis should be in its own nature susceptible of being proved by other evidence. This seems to be the philosophical import of Newton's maxim, (so often cited with approbation by subsequent writers,) that the cause assigned for any phenomenon must not only be such as if admitted would explain the phenomenon, but must also be a vera causa. What he meant by a vera causa Newton did not indeed very explicitly define; and Dr. Whewell, who dissents from the propriety of any such restriction upon the latitude of framing hypotheses, has had little difficulty in showing[3] that his conception of it was neither precise nor consistent with itself: accordingly his optical theory was a signal instance of the violation of his own rule. It is certainly not necessary that the cause assigned should be a cause already known; else how could we ever become acquainted with any new cause? But what is true in the maxim is, that the cause, though not known previously, should be capable of being known thereafter; that its existence should be capable of being detected, and its connexion with the effect ascribed to it should be susceptible of being proved, by independent evidence. The hypothesis, by suggesting observations and experiments, puts us on the road to that independent evidence if it be really attainable; and till it be attained, the hypothesis ought not to count for more than a conjecture.
There can be no doubt that every such resemblance which can be pointed out between B and A, affords some degree of probability, beyond what would otherwise exist, in favour of the conclusion drawn from it. If B resembled A in all its ultimate properties, its possessing the attribute m would be a certainty, not a probability: and every resemblance which can be shown to exist between them, places it by so much the nearer to that point. If the resemblance be in an ultimate property, there will be resemblance in all the derivative properties dependent on that ultimate property, and of these m may be one. If the resemblance be in a derivative property, there is reason to expect resemblance in the ultimate property on which it depends, and in the other derivative properties dependent on the same ultimate property. Every resemblance which can be shown to exist, affords ground for expecting an indefinite number of other resemblances: the particular resemblance sought will, therefore, be oftener found among things thus known to resemble, than among things between which we know of no resemblance.[24]
The generalization, that an event occurs in ten out of every hundred cases of a given description, is as real an induction as if the generalization were that it occurs in all cases. But when we arrive at the conclusion by merely counting instances in actual experience, and comparing the number of cases in which A has been present with the number in which it has been absent, the evidence is only that of the method of Agreement, and the conclusion amounts only to an empirical law. We can make a step beyond this when we can ascend to the causes on which the occurrence of A or its non-occurrence will depend, and form an estimate of the comparative frequency of the causes favourable and of those unfavourable to the occurrence. These are data of a higher order, by which the empirical law derived from a mere numerical comparison of affirmative and negative instances will be either corrected or confirmed, and in either case we shall obtain a more correct measure of probability than is given by that numerical comparison. It has been well remarked that in the kind of examples by which the doctrine of chances is usually illustrated, that of balls in a box, the estimate of probabilities is supported by reasons of causation, stronger than specific experience. "What is the reason that in a box where there are nine black balls and one white, we expect to draw a black ball nine times as much (in other words, nine times as often, frequency being the gauge of intensity in expectation) as a white? Obviously because the local conditions are nine times as favourable, because the hand may alight in nine places and get a black ball, while it can only alight in one place and find a white ball; just for the same reason that we do not expect to succeed in finding a friend in a crowd, the conditions in order that we and he should come together being many and difficult. This of course would not hold to the same extent were the white balls of smaller size than the black, neither would the probability remain the same: the larger ball would be much more likely to meet the hand."[19]
Accordingly, most thinkers of any degree of sobriety allow, that an hypothesis of this kind is not to be received as probably true because it accounts for all the known phenomena; since this is a condition sometimes fulfilled tolerably well by two conflicting hypotheses; while there are probably a thousand more which are equally possible, but which, for want of anything analogous in our experience, our minds are unfitted to conceive. But it seems to be thought that an hypothesis of the sort in question is entitled to a more favourable reception, if, besides accounting for all the facts previously known, it has led to the anticipation and prediction of others which experience afterwards verified; as the undulatory theory of light led to the prediction, subsequently realized by experiment, that two luminous rays might meet each other in such a manner as to produce darkness. Such predictions and their fulfilment are, indeed, well calculated to impress the uninformed, whose faith in science rests solely on similar coincidences between its prophecies and what comes to pass. But it is strange that any considerable stress should be laid upon such a coincidence by persons of scientific attainments. If the laws of the propagation of light accord with those of the vibrations of an elastic fluid in as many respects as is necessary to make the hypothesis afford a correct expression of all or most of the phenomena known at the time, it is nothing strange that they should accord with each other in one respect more. Though twenty such coincidences should occur, they would not prove the reality of the undulatory ether; it would not follow that the phenomena of light were results of the laws of elastic fluids, but at most that they are governed by laws partially identical with these; which, we may observe, is already certain, from the fact that the hypothesis in question could be for a moment tenable.[7] Cases may be cited, even in our imperfect acquaintance with nature, where agencies that we have good reason to consider as radically distinct, produce their effects, or some of their effects, according to laws which are identical. The law, for example, of the inverse square of the distance, is the measure of the intensity not only of gravitation, but (it is believed) of illumination, and of heat diffused from a centre. Yet no one looks upon this identity as proving similarity in the mechanism by which the three kinds of phenomena are produced.
On this ground, though I cannot accept as positive doctrines any of those scientific hypotheses which are unsusceptible of being ultimately brought to the test of actual induction, such, for instance, as the two theories of light, the emission theory of the last century, and the undulatory theory which predominates in the present, I am yet unable to agree with those who consider such hypotheses to be worthy of entire disregard. As is well said by Hartley (and concurred in by a thinker in general so diametrically opposed to Hartley's opinions as Dugald Stewart), "any hypothesis which has so much plausibility as to explain a considerable number of facts, helps us to digest these facts in proper order, to bring new ones to light, and make experimenta crucis for the sake of future inquirers."[25] If an hypothesis both explains known facts, and has led to the prediction of others previously unknown, and since verified by experience, the laws of the phenomenon which is the subject of inquiry must bear at least a great similarity to those of the class of phenomena to which the hypothesis assimilates it; and since the analogy which extends so far may probably extend farther, nothing is more likely to suggest experiments tending to throw light upon the real properties of the phenomenon, than the following out such an hypothesis. But to this end it is by no means necessary that the hypothesis be mistaken for a scientific truth. On the contrary, that illusion is in this respect, as in every other, an impediment to the progress of real knowledge, by leading inquirers to restrict themselves arbitrarily to the particular hypothesis which is most accredited at the time, instead of looking out for every class of phenomena between the laws of which and those of the given phenomenon any analogy exists, and trying all such experiments as may tend to the discovery of ulterior analogies pointing in the same direction.
Except, however, in such cases as games of chance, where the very purpose in view requires ignorance instead of knowledge, I can conceive no case in which we ought to be satisfied with such an estimate of chances as this; an estimate founded on the absolute minimum of knowledge respecting the subject. It is plain that, in the case of the coloured balls, a very slight ground of surmise that the white balls were really more numerous than either of the other colours, would suffice to vitiate the whole of the calculations made in our previous state of indifference. It would place us in that position of more advanced knowledge, in which the probabilities, to us, would be different from what they were before; and in estimating these new probabilities we should have to proceed on a totally different set of data, furnished no longer by mere counting of possible suppositions, but by specific knowledge of facts. Such data it should always be our endeavour to obtain; and in all inquiries, unless on subjects equally beyond the range of our means of knowledge and our practical uses, they may be obtained, if not good, at least better than none at all.[18]
Such uniformities in the course of nature as do not bear marks of being the results of causation, are, as we have already seen, admissible as universal truths with a degree of credence proportioned to their generality. Those which are true of all things whatever, or at least which are totally independent of the varieties of Kinds, namely, the laws of number and extension, to which we may add the law of causation itself, are probably the only ones, an exception to which is absolutely and permanently incredible. Accordingly, it is to assertions supposed to be contradictory to these laws, or to some others coming near to them in generality, that the word impossibility (at least total impossibility) seems to be generally confined. Violations of other laws, of special laws of causation for instance, are said, by persons studious of accuracy in expression, to be impossible in the circumstances of the case; or impossible unless some cause had existed which did not exist in the particular case.[43] Of no assertion, not in contradiction to some of these very general laws, will more than improbability be asserted by any cautious person; and improbability not of the highest degree, unless the time and place in which the fact is said to have occurred, render it almost certain that the anomaly, if real, could not have been overlooked by other observers. Suspension of judgment is in all other cases the resource of the judicious inquirer; provided the testimony in favour of the anomaly presents, when well sifted, no suspicious circumstances.
§ 3. Now this last-mentioned element in the resolution of a derivative law, the element which is not a law of causation, but a collocation of causes, cannot itself be reduced to any law. There is (as formerly remarked[14]) no uniformity, no norma, principle, or rule, perceivable in the distribution of the primeval natural agents through the universe. The different substances composing the earth, the powers that pervade the universe, stand in no constant relation to one another. One substance is more abundant than others, one power acts through a larger extent of space than others, without any pervading analogy that we can discover. We not only do not know of any reason why the sun's attraction and the force in the direction of the tangent coexist in the exact proportion they do, but we can trace no coincidence between it and the proportions in which any other elementary powers in the universe are intermingled. The utmost disorder is apparent in the combination of the causes; which is consistent with the most regular order in their effects; for when each agent carries on its own operations according to an uniform law, even the most capricious combination of agencies will generate a regularity of some sort; as we see in the kaleidoscope, where any casual arrangement of coloured bits of glass produces by the laws of reflection a beautiful regularity in the effect.
In a case of this description, the fact asserted is the existence of a new Kind; which in itself is not in the slightest degree incredible, and only to be rejected if the improbability that any variety of object existing at the particular place and time should not have been discovered sooner, be greater than that of error or mendacity in the witnesses. Accordingly, such assertions, when made by credible persons, and of unexplored places, are not disbelieved, but at most regarded as requiring confirmation from subsequent observers; unless the alleged properties of the supposed new Kind are at variance with known properties of some larger kind which includes it; or in other words, unless, in the new Kind which is asserted to exist, some properties are said to have been found disjoined from others which have always been known to accompany them; as in the case of Pliny's men, or any other kind of animal of a structure different from that which has always been found to coexist with animal life. On the mode of dealing with any such case, little needs be added to what has been said on the same topic in the twenty-second chapter.[42] When the uniformities of coexistence which the alleged fact would violate, are such as to raise a strong presumption of their being the result of causation, the fact which conflicts with them is to be disbelieved; at least provisionally, and subject to further investigation. When the presumption amounts to a virtual certainty, as in the case of the general structure of organized beings, the only question requiring consideration is whether, in phenomena so little understood, there may not be liabilities to counteraction from causes hitherto unknown; or whether the phenomena may not be capable of originating in some other way, which would produce a different set of derivative uniformities. Where (as in the case of the flying fish, or the ornithorhynchus) the generalization to which the alleged fact would be an exception is very special and of limited range, neither of the above suppositions can be deemed very improbable; and it is generally, in the case of such alleged anomalies, wise to suspend our judgment, pending the subsequent inquiries which will not fail to confirm the assertion if it be true. But when the generalization is very comprehensive, embracing a vast number and variety of observations, and covering a considerable province of the domain of nature; then, for reasons which have been fully explained, such an empirical law comes near to the certainty of an ascertained law of causation: and any alleged exception to it cannot be admitted, unless on the evidence of some law of causation proved by a still more complete induction.
[2] Mr. Bailey has given by far the best statement of this theory. "The general name," he says, "raises up the image sometimes of one individual of the class formerly seen, sometimes of another, not unfrequently of many individuals in succession; and it sometimes suggests an image made up of elements from several different objects, by a latent process of which I am not conscious." (Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1st series, letter 22.) But Mr. Bailey must allow that we carry on inductions and ratiocinations respecting the class, by means of this idea or conception of some one individual in it. This is all I require. The name of a class calls up some idea, through which we can, to all intents and purposes, think of the class as such, and not solely of an individual member of it.
The periodical return of eclipses, as originally ascertained by the persevering observation of the early eastern astronomers, was an empirical law, until the general laws of the celestial motions had accounted for it. The following are empirical laws still waiting to be resolved into the simpler laws from which they are derived. The local laws of the flux and reflux of the tides in different places: the succession of certain kinds of weather to certain appearances of sky: the apparent exceptions to the almost universal truth that bodies expand by increase of temperature: the law that breeds, both animal and vegetable, are improved by crossing: that gases have a strong tendency to permeate animal membranes: that substances containing a very high proportion of nitrogen (such as hydrocyanic acid and morphia) are powerful poisons: that when different metals are fused together, the alloy is harder than the various elements: that the number of atoms of acid required to neutralize one atom of any base, is equal to the number of atoms of oxygen in the base: that the solubility of substances in one another, depends[12] (at least in some degree) on the similarity of their elements.
§ 5. This function, however, of hypotheses, is one which must be reckoned absolutely indispensable in science. When Newton said, "Hypotheses non fingo," he did not mean that he deprived himself of the facilities of investigation afforded by assuming in the first instance what he hoped ultimately to be able to prove. Without such assumptions, science could never have attained its present state: they are necessary steps in the progress to something more certain; and nearly everything which is now theory was once hypothesis. Even in purely experimental science, some inducement is necessary for trying one experiment rather than another; and though it is abstractedly possible that all the experiments which have been tried, might have been produced by the mere desire to ascertain what would happen in certain circumstances, without any previous conjecture as to the result; yet, in point of fact, those unobvious, delicate, and often cumbrous and tedious processes of experiment, which have thrown most light upon the general constitution of nature, would hardly ever have been undertaken by the persons or at the time they were, unless it had seemed to depend on them whether some general doctrine or theory which had been suggested, but not yet proved, should be admitted or not. If this be true even of merely experimental inquiry, the conversion of experimental into deductive truths could still less have been effected without large temporary assistance from hypotheses. The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused set of appearances, is necessarily tentative: we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption. The simplest supposition which accords with the more obvious facts, is the best to begin with; because its consequences are the most easily traced. This rude hypothesis is then rudely corrected, and the operation repeated; and the comparison of the consequences deducible from the corrected hypothesis, with the observed facts, suggests still further correction, until the deductive results are at last made to tally with the phenomena. "Some fact is as yet little understood, or some law is unknown: we frame on the subject an hypothesis as accordant as possible with the whole of the data already possessed; and the science, being thus enabled to move forward freely, always ends by leading to new consequences capable of observation, which either confirm or refute, unequivocally, the first supposition." Neither induction nor deduction would enable us to understand even the simplest phenomena, "if we did not often commence by anticipating on the results; by making a provisional supposition, at first essentially conjectural, as to some of the very notions which constitute the final object of the inquiry."[4] Let any one watch the manner in which he himself unravels a complicated mass of evidence; let him observe how, for instance, he elicits the true history of any occurrence from the involved statements of one or of many witnesses: he will find that he does not take all the items of evidence into his mind at once, and attempt to weave them together: he extemporises, from a few of the particulars, a first rude theory of the mode in which the facts took place, and then looks at the other statements one by one, to try whether they can be reconciled with that provisional theory, or what alterations or additions it requires to make it square with them. In this way, which has been justly compared to the Methods of Approximation of mathematicians, we arrive, by means of hypotheses, at conclusions not hypothetical.[5]
§ 2. As was observed in a former place,[27] the belief we entertain 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 generalization from many laws of inferior generality. We should never have had the notion of causation (in the philosophical meaning of the term) as a condition of all phenomena, unless many cases of causation, or in other words, many partial uniformities of sequence, had previously become familiar. The more obvious of the particular uniformities suggest, and give evidence of, the general uniformity, and the general uniformity, once established, enables us to prove the remainder of the particular uniformities of which it is made up. As, however, all rigorous processes of induction presuppose the general uniformity, our knowledge of the particular uniformities from which it was first inferred was not, of course, derived from rigorous induction, but from the loose and uncertain mode of induction per enumerationem simplicem: and the law of universal causation, being collected from results so obtained, cannot itself rest on any better foundation.
§ 5. From the preceding principles it is easy to deduce the demonstration of that theorem of the doctrine of probabilities, which is the foundation of its application to inquiries for ascertaining the occurrence of a given event, or the reality of an individual fact. The signs or evidences by which a fact is usually proved, are some of its consequences: and the inquiry hinges upon determining what cause is most likely to have produced a given effect. The theorem applicable to such investigations is the Sixth Principle in Laplace's Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités, which is described by him as the "fundamental principle of that branch of the Analysis of Chances, which consists in ascending from events to their causes."[22]
It is, in fact, evident, that when once causation is admitted as an universal law, our expectation of events can only be rationally grounded on that law. To a person who recognises that every event depends on causes, a thing's having happened once is a reason for expecting it to happen again, only because proving that there exists, or is liable to exist, a cause adequate to produce it.[20] The frequency of the particular event, apart from all surmise respecting its cause, can give rise to no other induction than that per enumerationem simplicem; and the precarious inferences derived from this, are superseded, and disappear from the field, as soon as the principle of causation makes its appearance there.
Notwithstanding, however, the abstract superiority of an estimate of probability grounded on causes, it is a fact that in almost all cases in which chances admit of estimation sufficiently precise to render their numerical appreciation of any practical value, the numerical data are not drawn from knowledge of the causes, but from experience of the events themselves. The probabilities of life at different ages, or in different climates; the probabilities of recovery from a particular disease; the chances of the birth of male or female offspring; the chances of the destruction of houses or other property by fire; the chances of the loss of a ship in a particular voyage; are deduced from bills of mortality, returns from hospitals, registers of births, of shipwrecks, &c., that is, from the observed frequency not of the causes, but of the effects. The reason is, that in all these classes of facts, the causes are either not amenable to direct observation at all, or not with the requisite precision, and we have no means of judging of their frequency except from the empirical law afforded by the frequency of the effects. The inference does not the less depend on causation alone. We reason from an effect to a similar effect by passing through the cause. If the actuary of an insurance office infers from his tables that among a hundred persons now living, of a particular age, five on the average will attain the age of seventy, his inference is legitimate, not for the simple reason that this is the proportion who have lived till seventy in times past, but because the fact of their having so lived shows that this is the proportion existing, at that place and time, between the causes which prolong life to the age of seventy, and those tending to bring it to an earlier close.[21]
none of their properties are ultimate, but all of them derivative, and produced by causation. And the presumption is confirmed, by the fact that the properties which vary from one individual to another, also generally vary more or less at different times in the same individual; which variation, like any other event, supposes a cause, and implies, consequently, that the properties are not independent of causation.
This kind of elimination, in which we do not eliminate any one assignable cause, but the multitude of floating unassignable ones, may be termed the Elimination of Chance. We afford an example of it when we repeat an experiment, in order, by taking the mean of different results, to get rid of the effects of the unavoidable errors of each individual experiment. When there is no permanent cause such as would produce a tendency to error peculiarly in one direction, we are warranted by experience in assuming that the errors on one side will, in a certain number of experiments, about balance the errors on the contrary side. We therefore repeat the experiment, until any change which is produced in the average of the whole by further repetition, falls within limits of error consistent with the degree of accuracy required by the purpose we have in view.[16]
§ 2. Propositions in the form, Most A are B, are of a very different degree of importance in science, and in the practice of life. To the scientific inquirer they are valuable chiefly as materials for, and steps towards, universal truths. The discovery of these is the proper end of science: its work is not done if it stops at the proposition that a majority of A are B, without circumscribing that majority by some common character, fitted to distinguish them from the minority. Independently of the inferior precision of such imperfect generalizations, and the inferior assurance with which they can be applied to individual cases, it is plain that, compared with exact generalizations, they are almost useless as means of discovering ulterior truths by way of deduction. We may, it is true, by combining the proposition Most A are B, with an universal proposition, Every B is C, arrive at the conclusion that Most A are C. But when a second proposition of the approximate kind is introduced,—or even when there is but one, if that one be the major premise,—nothing can in general be positively concluded. When the major is Most B are D, then, even if the minor be Every A is B, we cannot infer that most A are D, or with any certainty that even some A are D. Though the majority of the class B have the attribute signified by D, the whole of the sub-class A may belong to the minority.[34]
To the statement, that the condition of accounting for all the known phenomena is often fulfilled equally well by two conflicting hypotheses, Dr. Whewell makes answer that he knows "of no such case in the history of science, where the phenomena are at all numerous and complicated."[9] Such an affirmation, by a writer of Dr. Whewell's minute acquaintance with the history of science, would carry great authority, if he had not, a few pages before, taken pains to refute it,[10] by maintaining that even the exploded scientific hypotheses might always, or almost always, have been so modified as to make them correct representations of the phenomena. The hypothesis of vortices, he tells us, was, by successive modifications, brought to coincide in its results with the Newtonian theory and with the facts. The vortices did not indeed explain all the phenomena which the Newtonian theory was ultimately found to account for, such as the precession of the equinoxes; but this phenomenon was not, at the time, in the contemplation of either party, as one of the facts to be accounted for. All the facts which they did contemplate, we may believe on Dr. Whewell's authority to have accorded as accurately with the Cartesian hypothesis, in its finally improved state, as with Newton's.
§ 2. From a limited number of ultimate laws of causation, there are necessarily generated a vast number of derivative uniformities, both of succession and of coexistence. Some are laws of succession or of coexistence between different effects of the same cause: of these we had examples in the last chapter. Some are laws of succession between effects and their remote causes; resolvable into the laws which connect each with the intermediate link. Thirdly, when causes act together and compound their effects, the laws of those causes generate the fundamental law of the effect, namely, that it depends on the coexistence of those causes. And, finally, the order of succession or of coexistence which obtains among effects, necessarily depends on their causes. If they are effects of the same cause, it depends on the laws of that cause; if on different causes, it depends on the laws of those causes severally, and on the circumstances which determine their coexistence. If we inquire further when and how the causes will coexist, that, again, depends on their causes: and we may thus trace back the phenomena higher and higher, until the different series of effects meet in a point, and the whole is shown to have depended ultimately on some common cause; or until, instead of converging to one point, they terminate in different points, and the order of the effects is proved to have arisen from the collocation of some of the primeval causes, or natural agents. For example, the order of succession and of coexistence among the heavenly motions, which is expressed by Kepler's laws, is derived from the coexistence of two primeval causes, the sun, and the original impulse or projectile force belonging to each planet.[13] Kepler's laws are resolved into the laws of these causes and the fact of their coexistence.
I do not mean to condemn those who employ themselves in working out into detail this sort of hypotheses; it is useful to ascertain what are the known phenomena, to the laws of which those of the subject of inquiry bear the greatest, or even a great analogy, since this may suggest (as in the case of the luminiferous ether it actually did) experiments to determine whether the analogy which goes so far does not extend still further. But that, in doing this, we should imagine ourselves to be seriously inquiring whether the hypothesis of an ether, an electric fluid, or the like, is true; that we should fancy it possible to obtain the assurance that the phenomena are produced in that way and no other; seems to me, I confess, unworthy of the present improved conceptions of the methods of physical science. And at the risk of being charged with want of modesty, I cannot help expressing astonishment that a philosopher of Dr. Whewell's abilities and attainments should have written an elaborate treatise on the philosophy of induction, in which he recognises absolutely no mode of induction except that of trying hypothesis after hypothesis until one is found which fits the phenomena; which one, when found, is to be assumed as true, with no other reservation than that if on re-examination it should appear to assume more than is needful for explaining the phenomena, the superfluous part of the assumption should be cut off. And this without the slightest distinction between the cases in which it may be known beforehand that two different hypotheses cannot lead to the same result, and those in which, for aught we can ever know, the range of suppositions, all equally consistent with the phenomena, may be infinite.[11]
To begin with the science of number. The elementary or ultimate truths of this science are the common axioms concerning equality, namely, "Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another," and "Equals added to equals make equal sums," (no other axioms are required,[38]) together with the definitions of the various numbers. Like other so-called definitions, these are composed of two things, the explanation of a name, and the assertion of a fact: of which the latter alone can form a first principle or premise of a science. The fact asserted in the definition of a number is a physical fact. Each of the numbers two, three, four, &c., denotes physical phenomena, and connotes a physical property of those phenomena. Two, for instance, denotes all pairs of things, and twelve all dozens of things, connoting what makes them pairs, or dozens; and that which makes them so is something physical; since it cannot be denied that two apples are physically distinguishable from three apples, two horses from one horse, and so forth: that they are a different visible and tangible phenomenon. I am not undertaking to say what the difference is; it is enough that there is a difference of which the senses can take cognizance. And although a hundred and two horses are not so easily distinguished from a hundred and three, as two horses are from three—though in most positions the senses do not perceive any difference—yet they may be so placed that a difference will be perceptible, or else we should never have distinguished them, and given them different names. Weight is confessedly a physical property of things; yet small differences between great weights are as imperceptible to the senses in most situations, as small differences between great numbers; and are only put in evidence by placing the two objects in a peculiar position—namely, in the opposite scales of a delicate balance.
§ 1. In the First Book, we found that all the assertions which can be conveyed by language, express some one or more of five different things: Existence; Order in Place; Order in Time; Causation; and Resemblance.[36] Of these, Causation, in our view of the subject, not being fundamentally different from Order in Time, the five species of possible assertions are reduced to four. The propositions which affirm Order in Time, in either of its two modes, Coexistence and Succession, have formed, thus far, the subject of the present Book. And we have now concluded the exposition, so far as it falls within the limits assigned to this work, of the nature of the evidence on which these propositions rest, and the processes of investigation by which they are ascertained and proved. There remain three classes of facts: Existence, Order in Place, and Resemblance; in regard to which the same questions are now to be resolved.
But in order that any alleged fact should be contradictory to a law of causation, the allegation must be, not simply that the cause existed without being followed by the effect, for that would be no uncommon occurrence; but that this happened in the absence of any adequate counteracting cause. Now in the case of an alleged miracle, the assertion is the exact opposite of this. It is, that the effect was defeated, not in the absence, but in consequence of a counteracting cause, namely, a direct interposition of an act of the will of some being who has power over nature; and in particular of a Being, whose will being assumed to have endowed all the causes with the powers by which they produce their effects, may well be supposed able to counteract them. A miracle (as was justly remarked by Brown[41]) is no contradiction to the law of cause and effect; it is a new effect, supposed to be produced by the introduction of a new cause. Of the adequacy of that cause, if present, there can be no doubt; and the only antecedent improbability which can be ascribed to the miracle, is the improbability that any such cause existed.
It must, at the same time, be remarked, that the reasons for this reliance do not hold in circumstances unknown to us, and beyond the possible range of our experience. In distant parts of the stellar regions, where the phenomena may be entirely unlike those with which we are acquainted, it would be folly to affirm confidently that this general law prevails, 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 adjacent cases. To extend it further is to make a supposition without evidence, 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.[30]
§ 6. The former of these suppositions necessarily implies that the colour is an effect of causation. If blackness, in the crows in which it has been observed, be not a property of Kind, but can be present or absent without any difference generally in the properties of the object; then it is not an ultimate fact in the individuals themselves, but is certainly dependent on a cause. There are, no doubt, many properties which vary from individual to individual of the same Kind, even the same infima species, or lowest Kind. Some flowers may be either white or red, without differing in any other respect. But these properties are not ultimate; they depend on causes. So far as the properties of a thing belong to its own nature, and do not arise from some cause extrinsic to it, they are always the same in the same Kind. Take, for instance, all simple substances and elementary powers; the only things of which we are certain that some at least of their properties are really ultimate. Colour is generally esteemed the most variable of all properties: yet we do not find that sulphur is sometimes yellow and sometimes white, or that it varies in colour at all, except so far as colour is the effect of some extrinsic cause, as of the sort of light thrown upon it, the mechanical arrangement of the particles, (as after fusion) &c. We do not find that iron is sometimes fluid and sometimes solid at the same temperature; gold sometimes malleable and sometimes brittle; that hydrogen will sometimes combine with oxygen and sometimes not; or the like. If from simple substances we pass to any of their definite compounds, as water, lime, or sulphuric acid, there is the same constancy in their properties. When properties vary from individual to individual, it is either in the case of miscellaneous aggregations, such as atmospheric air or rock, composed of heterogeneous substances, and not constituting or belonging to any real Kind,[33] or it is in the case of organic beings. In them, indeed, there is variability in a high degree. Animals of the same species and race, human beings of the same age, sex, and country, will be most different, for example, in face and figure. But organized beings (from the extreme complication of the laws by which they are regulated) being more eminently modifiable, that is, liable to be influenced by a greater number and variety of causes, than any other phenomena whatever; having also themselves had a beginning, and therefore a cause; there is reason to believe that none of their properties are ultimate, but all of them derivative, and produced by causation. And the presumption is confirmed, by the fact that the properties which vary from one individual to another, also generally vary more or less at different times in the same individual; which variation, like any other event, supposes a cause, and implies, consequently, that the properties are not independent of causation.
In a former place,[31] it has been explained in some detail what is meant by the Kinds of objects; those classes which differ from one another not by a limited and definite, but by an indefinite and unknown, number of distinctions. To this we have now to add, that every proposition by which anything is asserted of a Kind, affirms an uniformity of coexistence. Since we know nothing of Kinds but their properties, the Kind, to us, is the set of properties by which it is identified, and which must of course be sufficient to distinguish it from every other kind.[32] In affirming anything, therefore, of a Kind, we are affirming something to be uniformly coexistent with the properties by which the kind is recognised; and that is the sole meaning of the assertion.
When a judgment applied to an individual instance is grounded on two approximate generalizations taken in conjunction, the propositions may co-operate towards the result in two different ways. In the one, each proposition is separately applicable to the case in hand, and our object in combining them is to give to the conclusion in that particular case the double probability arising from the two propositions separately. This may be called joining two probabilities by way of Addition; and the result is a probability greater than either. The other mode is, when only one of the propositions is directly applicable to the case, the second being only applicable to it by virtue of the application of the first. This is joining two probabilities by way of Ratiocination or Deduction; the result of which is a less probability than either. The type of the first argument is, Most A are B; most C are B; this thing is both an A and a C; therefore it is probably a B. The type of the second is, Most A are B; most C are A; this is a C; therefore it is probably an A, therefore it is probably a B. The first is exemplified when we prove a fact by the testimony of two unconnected witnesses; the second, when we adduce only the testimony of one witness that he has heard the thing asserted by another. Or again, in the first mode it may be argued that the accused committed the crime, because he concealed himself, and because his clothes were stained with blood; in the second, that he committed it because he washed or destroyed his clothes, which is supposed to render it probable that they were stained with blood. Instead of only two links, as in these instances, we may suppose chains of any length. A chain of the former kind was termed by Bentham[35] a self-corroborative chain of evidence; the second, a self-infirmative chain.
To the statement, that the condition of accounting for all the known phenomena is often fulfilled equally well by two conflicting hypotheses, Dr. Whewell makes answer that he knows "of no such case in the history of science, where the phenomena are at all numerous and complicated."[9] Such an affirmation, by a writer of Dr. Whewell's minute acquaintance with the history of science, would carry great authority, if he had not, a few pages before, taken pains to refute it,[10] by maintaining that even the exploded scientific hypotheses might always, or almost always, have been so modified as to make them correct representations of the phenomena. The hypothesis of vortices, he tells us, was, by successive modifications, brought to coincide in its results with the Newtonian theory and with the facts. The vortices did not indeed explain all the phenomena which the Newtonian theory was ultimately found to account for, such as the precession of the equinoxes; but this phenomenon was not, at the time, in the contemplation of either party, as one of the facts to be accounted for. All the facts which they did contemplate, we may believe on Dr. Whewell's authority to have accorded as accurately with the Cartesian hypothesis, in its finally improved state, as with Newton's.
on the first, the observed uniformity of coexistence can only hold good as an empirical law, within the limits not only of actual observation, but of an observation as accurate as the nature of the case required. And hence it is that (as remarked in an early chapter of the present Book) we so often give up generalizations of this class at the first summons. If any credible witness stated that he had seen a white crow, under circumstances which made it not incredible that it should have escaped notice previously, we should give full credence to the statement.
In a former place,[31] it has been explained in some detail what is meant by the Kinds of objects; those classes which differ from one another not by a limited and definite, but by an indefinite and unknown, number of distinctions. To this we have now to add, that every proposition by which anything is asserted of a Kind, affirms an uniformity of coexistence. Since we know nothing of Kinds but their properties, the Kind, to us, is the set of properties by which it is identified, and which must of course be sufficient to distinguish it from every other kind.[32] In affirming anything, therefore, of a Kind, we are affirming something to be uniformly coexistent with the properties by which the kind is recognised; and that is the sole meaning of the assertion.
[3] I have entered rather fully into this question in chap. xvii. of An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, headed "The Doctrine of Concepts or General Notions," which contains my last views on the subject.
According to Dr. Whewell, the coincidence of results predicted from an hypothesis, with facts afterwards observed, amounts to a conclusive proof of the truth of the theory. "If I copy a long series of letters, of which the last half dozen are concealed, and if I guess these aright, as is found to be the case when they are afterwards uncovered, this must be because I have made out the import of the inscription. To say, that because I have copied all that I could see, it is nothing strange that I should guess those which I cannot see, would be absurd, without supposing such a ground for guessing."[8] If any one, from examining the greater part of a long inscription, can interpret the characters so that the inscription gives a rational meaning in a known language, there is a strong presumption that his interpretation is correct; but I do not think the presumption much increased by his being able to guess the few remaining letters without seeing them: for we should naturally expect (when the nature of the case excludes chance) that even an erroneous interpretation which accorded with all the visible parts of the inscription would accord also with the small remainder; as would be the case, for example, if the inscription had been designedly so contrived as to admit of a double sense. I assume that the uncovered characters afford an amount of coincidence too great to be merely casual: otherwise the illustration is not a fair one. No one supposes the agreement with the phenomena of light with the theory of undulations to be merely fortuitous. It must arise from the actual identity of some of the laws of undulations with some of those of light: and if there be that identity, it is reasonable to suppose that its consequences would not end with the phenomena which first suggested the identification, nor be even confined to such phenomena as were known at the time. But it does not follow, because some of the laws agree with those of undulations, that there are any actual undulations; no more than it followed because some (though not so many) of the same laws agreed with those of the projection of particles, that there was actual emission of particles. Even the undulatory hypothesis does not account for all the phenomena of light. The natural colours of objects, the compound nature of the solar ray, the absorption of light, and its chemical and vital action, the hypothesis leaves as mysterious as it found them; and some of these facts are, at least apparently, more reconcileable with the emission theory than with that of Young and Fresnel. Who knows but that some third hypothesis, including all these phenomena, may in time leave the undulatory theory as far behind as that has left the theory of Newton and his successors?
According to the foregoing remarks, hypotheses are invented to enable the Deductive Method to be earlier applied to phenomena. But[2] in order to discover the cause of any phenomenon by the Deductive Method, the process must consist of three parts; induction, ratiocination, and verification. Induction, (the place of which, however, may be supplied by a prior deduction,) to ascertain the laws of the causes; ratiocination, to compute from those laws, how the causes will operate in the particular combination known to exist in the case in hand; verification, by comparing this calculated effect with the actual phenomenon. No one of these three parts of the process can be dispensed with. In the deduction which proves the identity of gravity with the central force of the solar system, all the three are found. First, it is proved from the moon's motions, that the earth attracts her with a force varying as the inverse square of the distance. This (though partly dependent on prior deductions) corresponds to the first, or purely inductive, step, the ascertainment of the law of the cause. Secondly, from this law, and from the knowledge previously obtained of the moon's mean distance from the earth, and of the actual amount of her deflexion from the tangent, it is ascertained with what rapidity the earth's attraction would cause the moon to fall, if she were no further off, and no more acted upon by extraneous forces, than terrestrial bodies are: that is the second step, the ratiocination. Finally, this calculated velocity being compared with the observed velocity with which all heavy bodies fall, by mere gravity, towards the surface of the earth, (sixteen feet in the first second, forty-eight in the second, and so forth, in the ratio of the odd numbers, 1, 3, 5, &c.,) the two quantities are found to agree. The order in which the steps are here presented, was not that of their discovery; but it is their correct logical order, as portions of the proof that the same attraction of the earth which causes the moon's motion, causes also the fall of heavy bodies to the earth: a proof which is thus complete in all its parts.
§ 5. This function, however, of hypotheses, is one which must be reckoned absolutely indispensable in science. When Newton said, "Hypotheses non fingo," he did not mean that he deprived himself of the facilities of investigation afforded by assuming in the first instance what he hoped ultimately to be able to prove. Without such assumptions, science could never have attained its present state: they are necessary steps in the progress to something more certain; and nearly everything which is now theory was once hypothesis. Even in purely experimental science, some inducement is necessary for trying one experiment rather than another; and though it is abstractedly possible that all the experiments which have been tried, might have been produced by the mere desire to ascertain what would happen in certain circumstances, without any previous conjecture as to the result; yet, in point of fact, those unobvious, delicate, and often cumbrous and tedious processes of experiment, which have thrown most light upon the general constitution of nature, would hardly ever have been undertaken by the persons or at the time they were, unless it had seemed to depend on them whether some general doctrine or theory which had been suggested, but not yet proved, should be admitted or not. If this be true even of merely experimental inquiry, the conversion of experimental into deductive truths could still less have been effected without large temporary assistance from hypotheses. The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused set of appearances, is necessarily tentative: we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption. The simplest supposition which accords with the more obvious facts, is the best to begin with; because its consequences are the most easily traced. This rude hypothesis is then rudely corrected, and the operation repeated; and the comparison of the consequences deducible from the corrected hypothesis, with the observed facts, suggests still further correction, until the deductive results are at last made to tally with the phenomena. "Some fact is as yet little understood, or some law is unknown: we frame on the subject an hypothesis as accordant as possible with the whole of the data already possessed; and the science, being thus enabled to move forward freely, always ends by leading to new consequences capable of observation, which either confirm or refute, unequivocally, the first supposition." Neither induction nor deduction would enable us to understand even the simplest phenomena, "if we did not often commence by anticipating on the results; by making a provisional supposition, at first essentially conjectural, as to some of the very notions which constitute the final object of the inquiry."[4] Let any one watch the manner in which he himself unravels a complicated mass of evidence; let him observe how, for instance, he elicits the true history of any occurrence from the involved statements of one or of many witnesses: he will find that he does not take all the items of evidence into his mind at once, and attempt to weave them together: he extemporises, from a few of the particulars, a first rude theory of the mode in which the facts took place, and then looks at the other statements one by one, to try whether they can be reconciled with that provisional theory, or what alterations or additions it requires to make it square with them. In this way, which has been justly compared to the Methods of Approximation of mathematicians, we arrive, by means of hypotheses, at conclusions not hypothetical.[5]
Along with these three general principles or axioms, the remainder of the premises of geometry consists of the so-called definitions, that is to say, propositions asserting the real existence of the various objects therein designated, together with some one property of each. In some cases more than one property is commonly assumed, but in no case is more than one necessary. It is assumed that there are such things in nature as straight lines, and that any two of them setting out from the same point, diverge more and more without limit. This assumption, (which includes and goes beyond Euclid's axiom that two straight lines cannot inclose a space,) is as indispensable in geometry, and as evident, resting on as simple, familiar, and universal observation, as any of the other axioms. It is also assumed that straight lines diverge from one another in different degrees; in other words, that there are such things as angles, and that they are capable of being equal or unequal. It is assumed that there is such a thing as a circle, and that all its radii are equal; such things as ellipses, and that the sums of the focal distances are equal for every point in an ellipse; such things as parallel lines, and that those lines are everywhere equally distant.[39]
In the same work, and more particularly in the third volume, are also fully discussed the limits of the applicability of mathematical principles to the improvement of other sciences. Such principles are manifestly inapplicable, where the causes on which any class of phenomena depend are so imperfectly accessible to our observation, that we cannot ascertain, by a proper induction, their numerical laws; or where the causes are so numerous, and intermixed in so complex a manner with one another, that even supposing their laws known, the computation of the aggregate effect transcends the powers of the calculus as it is, or is likely to be; or lastly, where the causes themselves are in a state of perpetual fluctuation; as in physiology, and still more, if possible, in the social science. The mathematical solutions of physical questions become progressively more difficult and imperfect, in proportion as the questions divest themselves of their abstract and hypothetical character, and approach nearer to the degree of complication actually existing in nature; insomuch that beyond the limits of astronomical phenomena, and of those most nearly analogous to them, mathematical accuracy is generally obtained "at the expense of the reality of the inquiry:" while even in astronomical questions, "notwithstanding the admirable simplicity of their mathematical elements, our feeble intelligence becomes incapable of following out effectually the logical combinations of the laws on which the phenomena are dependent, as soon as we attempt to take into simultaneous consideration more than two or three essential influences."[40] Of this, the problem of the Three Bodies has already been cited, more than once, as a remarkable instance; the complete solution of so comparatively simple a question having vainly tried the skill of the most profound mathematicians. We may conceive, then, how chimerical would be the hope that mathematical principles could be advantageously applied to phenomena dependent on the mutual action of the innumerable minute particles of bodies, as those of chemistry, and still more, of physiology; and for similar reasons those principles remain inapplicable to the still more complex inquiries, the subjects of which are phenomena of society and government.
The witnesses of whom we are speaking must, from the nature of the case, be of a kind whose credibility falls materially short of certainty: let us suppose, then, the credibility of the witness in the case in question to be 9/10; that is, let us suppose that in every ten statements which the witness makes, nine on an average are correct, and one incorrect. Let us now suppose that there have taken place a sufficient number of drawings to exhaust all the possible combinations, the witness deposing in every one. In one case out of every ten in all these drawings he will actually have made a false announcement. But in the case of the thousand tickets these false announcements will have been distributed impartially over all the numbers, and of the 999 cases in which No. 79 was not drawn, there will have been only one case in which it was announced. On the contrary, in the case of the thousand balls, (the announcement being always either "black" or "white,") if white was not drawn, and there was a false announcement, that false announcement must have been white; and since by the supposition there was a false announcement once in every ten times, white will have been announced falsely in one tenth part of all the cases in which it was not drawn, that is, in one tenth part of 999 cases out of every thousand. White, then, is drawn, on an average, exactly as often as No. 79, but it is announced, without having been really drawn, 999 times as often as No. 79; the announcement therefore requires a much greater amount of testimony to render it credible.[44]
§ 6. It is perfectly consistent with the spirit of the method, to assume in this provisional manner not only an hypothesis respecting the law of what we already know to be the cause, but an hypothesis respecting the cause itself. It is allowable, useful, and often even necessary, to begin by asking ourselves what cause may have produced the effect, in order that we may know in what direction to look out for evidence to determine whether it actually did. The vortices of Descartes would have been a perfectly legitimate hypothesis, if it had been possible, by any mode of exploration which we could entertain the hope of ever possessing, to bring the reality of the vortices, as a fact in nature, conclusively to the test of observation. The hypothesis was vicious, simply because it could not lead to any course of investigation capable of converting it from an hypothesis into a proved fact. It might chance to be disproved, either by some want of correspondence with the phenomena it purported to explain, or (as actually happened) by some extraneous fact. "The free passage of comets through the spaces in which these vortices should have been, convinced men that these vortices did not exist."[6] But the hypothesis would have been false, though no such direct evidence of its falsity had been procurable. Direct evidence of its truth there could not be.
§ 1. "Probability," says Laplace,[17] "has reference partly to our ignorance, partly to our knowledge. We know that among three or more events, one, and only one, must happen; but there is nothing leading us to believe that any one of them will happen rather than the others. In this state of indecision, it is impossible for us to pronounce with certainty on their occurrence. It is, however, probable that any one of these events, selected at pleasure, will not take place; because we perceive several cases, all equally possible, which exclude its occurrence, and only one which favours it.
When, however, the coincidence is one which cannot be accounted for by any known cause, and the connexion between the two phenomena, if produced by causation, must be the result of some law of nature hitherto unknown; which is the case we had in view in the last chapter; then, though the probability of a casual coincidence may be capable of appreciation, that of the counter-supposition, the existence of an undiscovered law of nature, is clearly unsusceptible of even an approximate valuation. In order to have the data which such a case would require, it would be necessary to know what proportion of all the individual sequences or coexistences occurring in nature are the result of law, and what proportion are mere casual coincidences. It being evident that we cannot form any plausible conjecture as to this proportion, much less appreciate it numerically, we cannot attempt any precise estimation of the comparative probabilities. But of this we are sure, that the detection of an unknown law of nature—of some previously unrecognised constancy of conjunction among phenomena—is no uncommon event. If, therefore, the number of instances in which a coincidence is observed, over and above that which would arise on the average from the mere concurrence of chances, be such that so great an amount of coincidences from accident alone would be an extremely uncommon event; we have reason to conclude that the coincidence is the effect of causation, and may be received (subject to correction from further experience) as an empirical law. Further than this, in point of precision, we cannot go; nor, in most cases, is greater precision required, for the solution of any practical doubt.[23]
§ 4. The assertion, that our inductive processes assume the law of causation, while the law of causation is itself a case of induction, is a paradox, only on the old theory of reasoning, which supposes the universal truth, or major premise, in a ratiocination, to be the real proof of the particular truths which are ostensibly inferred from it. According to the doctrine maintained in the present treatise,[29] the major premise is not the proof of the conclusion, but is itself proved, along with the conclusion from the same evidence. "All men are mortal" is not the proof that Lord Palmerston is mortal; but our past experience of mortality authorizes us to infer both the general truth and the particular fact, and the one with exactly the same degree of assurance as the other. The mortality of Lord Palmerston is not an inference from the mortality of all men, but from the experience which proves the mortality of all men; and is a correct inference from experience, if that general truth is so too. This relation between our general beliefs and their particular applications holds equally true in the more comprehensive case which we are now discussing. Any new fact of causation inferred by induction, is rightly inferred, if no other objection can be made to the inference than can be made to the general truth that every event has a cause. The utmost certainty which can be given to a conclusion arrived at in the way of inference, stops at this point. When we have ascertained that the particular conclusion must stand or fall with the general uniformity of the laws of nature—that it is liable to no doubt except the doubt whether every event has a cause—we have done all that can be done for it. The strongest assurance we can obtain of any theory respecting the cause of a given phenomenon, is that the phenomenon has either that cause or none.
Aristotle, philosophizing on the subject of motion, remarked that certain motions apparently take place spontaneously; bodies fall to the ground, flame ascends, bubbles of air rise in water, &c.: and these he called natural motions; while others not only never take place without external incitement, but even when such incitement is applied, tend spontaneously to cease; which, to distinguish them from the former, he called violent motions. Now, in comparing the so-called natural motions with one another, it appeared to Aristotle that they agreed in one circumstance, namely, that the body which moved (or seemed to move) spontaneously, was moving towards its own place; meaning thereby the place from whence it originally came, or the place where a great quantity of matter similar to itself was assembled. In the other class of motions, as when bodies are thrown up in the air, they are, on the contrary, moving from their own place. Now, this conception of a body moving towards its own place may justly be considered inappropriate; because, though it expresses a circumstance really found in some of the most familiar instances of motion apparently spontaneous, yet, first, there are many other cases of such motion, in which that circumstance is absent: the motion, for instance, of the earth and planets. Secondly, even when it is present, the motion, on closer examination, would often be seen not to be spontaneous: as, when air rises in water, it does not rise by its own nature, but is pushed up by the superior weight of the water which presses upon it. Finally, there are many cases in which the spontaneous motion takes place in the contrary direction to what the theory considers as the body's own place; for instance, when a fog rises from a lake, or when water dries up. The agreement, therefore, which Aristotle selected as his principle of classification, did not extend to all cases of the phenomenon he wanted to study, spontaneous motion; while it did include cases of the absence of the phenomenon, cases of motion not spontaneous. The conception was hence "inappropriate." We may add that, in the case in question, no conception would be appropriate; there is no agreement which runs through all the cases of spontaneous or apparently spontaneous motion and no others: they cannot be brought under one law: it is a case of Plurality of Causes.[4]
§ 5. So much for the first of Dr. Whewell's conditions, that conceptions must be appropriate. The second is, that they shall be "clear:" and let us consider what this implies. Unless the conception corresponds to a real agreement, it has a worse defect than that of not being clear; it is not applicable to the case at all. Among the phenomena, therefore, which we are attempting to connect by means of the conception, we must suppose that there really is an agreement, and that the conception is a conception of that agreement. In order, then, that it may be clear, the only requisite is, that we shall know exactly in what the agreement consists; that it shall have been carefully observed, and accurately remembered. We are said not to have a clear conception of the resemblance among a set of objects, when we have only a general feeling that they resemble, without having analysed their resemblance, or perceived in what points it consists, and fixed in our memory an exact recollection of those points. This want of clearness, or, as it may be otherwise called, this vagueness, in the general conception, may be owing either to our having no accurate knowledge of the objects themselves, or merely to our not having carefully compared them. Thus a person may have no clear idea of a ship because he has never seen one, or because he remembers but little, and that faintly, of what he has seen. Or he may have a perfect knowledge and remembrance of many ships of various kinds, frigates among the rest, but he may have no clear but only a confused idea of a frigate, because he has never been told, and has not compared them sufficiently to have remarked and remembered, in what particular points a frigate differs from some other kind of ship.
It is not, however, necessary, in order to have clear ideas, that we should know all the common properties of the things which we class together. That would be to have our conception of the class complete as well as clear. It is sufficient if we never class things together without knowing exactly why we do so,—without having ascertained exactly what agreements we are about to include in our conception; and if, after having thus fixed our conception, we never vary from it, never include in the class anything which has not those common properties, nor exclude from it anything which has. A clear conception means a determinate conception; one which does not fluctuate, which is not one thing to-day and another to-morrow, but remains fixed and invariable, except when, from the progress of our knowledge, or the correction of some error, we consciously add to it or alter it. A person of clear ideas, is a person who always knows in virtue of what properties his classes are constituted; what attributes are connoted by his general names.
The principal requisites, therefore, of clear conceptions, are habits of attentive observation, an extensive experience, and a memory which receives and retains an exact image of what is observed. And in proportion as any one has the habit of observing minutely and comparing carefully a particular class of phenomena, and an accurate memory for the results of the observation and comparison, so will his conceptions of that class of phenomena be clear; provided he has the indispensable habit, (naturally, however, resulting from those other endowments,) of never using general names without a precise connotation.
As the clearness of our conceptions chiefly depends on the carefulness and accuracy of our observing and comparing faculties, so their appropriateness, or rather the chance we have of hitting upon the appropriate conception in any case, mainly depends on the activity of the same faculties. He who by habit, grounded on sufficient natural aptitude, has acquired a readiness in accurately observing and comparing phenomena, will perceive so many more agreements and will perceive them so much more rapidly than other people, that the chances are much greater of his perceiving, in any instance, the agreement on which the important consequences depend.
§ 6. It is of so much importance that the part of the process of investigating truth, discussed in this chapter, should be rightly understood, that I think it is desirable to restate the results we have arrived at, in a somewhat different mode of expression.
We cannot ascertain general truths, that is, truths applicable to classes, unless we have formed the classes in such a manner that general truths can be affirmed of them. In the formation of any class, there is involved a conception of it as a class, that is, a conception of certain circumstances as being those which characterize the class, and distinguish the objects composing it from all other things. When we know exactly what these circumstances are, we have a clear idea (or conception) of the class, and of the meaning of the general name which designates it. The primary condition implied in having this clear idea, is that the class be really a class; that it correspond to a real distinction; that the things it includes really do agree with one another in certain particulars, and differ, in those same particulars, from all other things. A person without clear ideas, is one who habitually classes together, under the same general names, things which have no common properties, or none which are not possessed also by other things; or who, if the usage of other people prevents him from actually misclassing things, is unable to state to himself the common properties in virtue of which he classes them rightly.
But it is not the sole requisite of classification that the classes should be real classes, framed by a legitimate mental process. Some modes of classing things are more valuable than others for human uses, whether of speculation or of practice; and our classifications are not well made, unless the things which they bring together not only agree with each other in something which distinguishes them from all other things, but agree with each other and differ from other things in the very circumstances which are of primary importance for the purpose (theoretical or practical) which we have in view, and which constitutes the problem before us. In other words, our conceptions, though they may be clear, are not appropriate for our purpose, unless the properties we comprise in them are those which will help us towards what we wish to understand—i. e., either those which go deepest into the nature of the things, if our object be to understand that, or those which are most closely connected with the particular property which we are endeavouring to investigate.
We cannot, therefore, frame good general conceptions beforehand. That the conception we have obtained is the one we want, can only be known when we have done the work for the sake of which we wanted it; when we completely understand the general character of the phenomena, or the conditions of the particular property with which we concern ourselves. General conceptions formed without this thorough knowledge, are Bacon's "notiones temerè à rebus abstractæ." Yet such premature conceptions we must be continually making up, in our progress to something better. They are an impediment to the progress of knowledge, only when they are permanently acquiesced in. When it has become our habit to group things in wrong classes—in groups which either are not really classes, having no distinctive points of agreement (absence of clear ideas), or which are not classes of which anything important to our purpose can be predicated (absence of appropriate ideas); and when, in the belief that these badly made classes are those sanctioned by Nature, we refuse to exchange them for others, and cannot or will not make up our general conceptions from any other elements; in that case all the evils which Bacon ascribes to his "notiones temerè abstractæ" really occur. This was what the ancients did in physics, and what the world in general does in morals and politics to the present day.
It would thus, in my view of the matter, be an inaccurate mode of expression to say, that obtaining appropriate conceptions is a condition precedent to generalization. Throughout the whole process of comparing phenomena with one another for the purpose of generalization, the mind is trying to make up a conception; but the conception which it is trying to make up is that of the really important point of agreement in the phenomena. As we obtain more knowledge of the phenomena themselves, and of the conditions on which their important properties depend, our views on this subject naturally alter; and thus we advance from a less to a more "appropriate" general conception, in the progress of our investigations.
We ought not, at the same time, to forget that the really important agreement cannot always be discovered by mere comparison of the very phenomena in question, without the aid of a conception acquired elsewhere; as in the case, so often referred to, of the planetary orbits.
The search for the agreement of a set of phenomena is in truth very similar to the search for a lost or hidden object. At first we place ourselves in a sufficiently commanding position, and cast our eyes round us, and if we can see the object it is well; if not, we ask ourselves mentally what are the places in which it may be hid, in order that we may there search for it: and so on, until we imagine the place where it really is. And here too we require to have had a previous conception, or knowledge, of those different places. As in this familiar process, so in the philosophical operation which it illustrates, we first endeavour to find the lost object or recognise the common attribute, without conjecturally invoking the aid of any previously acquired conception, or in other words, of any hypothesis. Having failed in this, we call upon our imagination for some hypothesis of a possible place, or a possible point of resemblance, and then look, to see whether the facts agree with the conjecture.
For such cases something more is required than a mind accustomed to accurate observation and comparison. It must be a mind stored with general conceptions, previously acquired, of the sorts which bear affinity to the subject of the particular inquiry. And much will also depend on the natural strength and acquired culture of what has been termed the scientific imagination; on the faculty possessed of mentally arranging known elements into new combinations, such as have not yet been observed in nature, though not contradictory to any known laws.
But the variety of intellectual habits, the purposes which they serve, and the modes in which they may be fostered and cultivated, are considerations belonging to the Art of Education: a subject far wider than Logic, and which this treatise does not profess to discuss. Here, therefore, the present chapter may properly close.
CHAPTER III.
OF NAMING, AS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION.
§ 1. It does not belong to the present undertaking to dwell on the importance of language as a medium of human intercourse, whether for purposes of sympathy or of information. Nor does our design admit of more than a passing allusion to that great property of names, on which their functions as an intellectual instrument are, in reality, ultimately dependent; their potency as a means of forming, and of riveting, associations among our other ideas: a subject on which an able thinker[5] has thus written:—
"Names are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold on the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when passed might be dissipated for ever, are, by their connexion with language, always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves, are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment. Words are the custodiers of every product of mind less impressive than themselves. All extensions of human knowledge, all new generalizations, are fixed and spread, even unintentionally, by the use of words. The child growing up learns, along with the vocables of his mother-tongue, that things which he would have believed to be different, are, in important points, the same. Without any formal instruction, the language in which we grow up teaches us all the common philosophy of the age. It directs us to observe and know things which we should have overlooked; it supplies us with classifications ready made, by which things are arranged (as far as the light of by-gone generations admits) with the objects to which they bear the greatest total resemblance. The number of general names in a language, and the degree of generality of those names, afford a test of the knowledge of the era, and of the intellectual insight which is the birthright of any one born into it."
It is not, however, of the functions of Names, considered generally, that we have here to treat, but only of the manner and degree in which they are directly instrumental to the investigation of truth; in other words, to the process of induction.
§ 2. Observation and Abstraction, the operations which formed the subject of the two foregoing chapters, are conditions indispensable to induction; there can be no induction where they are not. It has been imagined that Naming is also a condition equally indispensable. There are thinkers who have held that language is not solely, according to a phrase generally current, an instrument of thought, but the instrument: that names, or something equivalent to them, some species of artificial signs, are necessary to reasoning; that there could be no inference, and consequently no induction, without them. But if the nature of reasoning was correctly explained in the earlier part of the present work, this opinion must be held to be an exaggeration, though of an important truth. If reasoning be from particulars to particulars, and if it consist in recognising one fact as a mark of another, or a mark of a mark of another, nothing is required to render reasoning possible, except senses and association: senses to perceive that two facts are conjoined; association, as the law by which one of those two facts raises up the idea of the other.[6] For these mental phenomena, as well as for the belief or expectation which follows, and by which we recognise as having taken place, or as about to take place, that of which we have perceived a mark, there is evidently no need of language. And this inference of one particular fact from another is a case of induction. It is of this sort of induction that brutes are capable: it is in this shape that uncultivated minds make almost all their inductions, and that we all do so in the cases in which familiar experience forces our conclusions upon us without any active process of inquiry on our part, and in which the belief or expectation follows the suggestion of the evidence, with the promptitude and certainty of an instinct.[7]
§ 3. But though inference of an inductive character is possible without the use of signs, it could never, without them, be carried much beyond the very simple cases which we have just described, and which form, in all probability, the limit of the reasonings of those animals to whom conventional language is unknown. Without language, or something equivalent to it, there could only be as much reasoning from experience as can take place without the aid of general propositions. Now, though in strictness we may reason from past experience to a fresh individual case without the intermediate stage of a general proposition, yet without general propositions we should seldom remember what past experience we have had, and scarcely ever what conclusions that experience will warrant. The division of the inductive process into two parts, the first ascertaining what is a mark of the given fact, the second whether in the new case that mark exists, is natural, and scientifically indispensable. It is, indeed, in a majority of cases, rendered necessary by mere distance of time. The experience by which we are to guide our judgments may be other people's experience, little of which can be communicated to us otherwise than by language: when it is our own, it is generally experience long past; unless, therefore, it were recorded by means of artificial signs, little of it (except in cases involving our intenser sensations or emotions, or the subjects of our daily and hourly contemplation) would be retained in the memory. It is hardly necessary to add, that when the inductive inference is of any but the most direct and obvious nature—when it requires several observations or experiments, in varying circumstances, and the comparison of one of these with another—it is impossible to proceed a step, without the artificial memory which words bestow. Without words, we should, if we had often seen A and B in immediate and obvious conjunction, expect B whenever we saw A; but to discover their conjunction when not obvious, or to determine whether it is really constant or only casual, and whether there is reason to expect it under any given change of circumstances, is a process far too complex to be performed without some contrivance to make our remembrance of our own mental operations accurate. Now, language is such a contrivance. When that instrument is called to our aid, the difficulty is reduced to that of making our remembrance of the meaning of words accurate. This being secured, whatever passes through our minds may be remembered accurately, by putting it carefully into words, and committing the words either to writing or to memory.
The function of Naming, and particularly of General Names, in Induction, may be recapitulated as follows. Every inductive inference which is good at all, is good for a whole class of cases: and, that the inference may have any better warrant of its correctness than the mere clinging together of two ideas, a process of experimentation and comparison is necessary; in which the whole class of cases must be brought to view, and some uniformity in the course of nature evolved and ascertained, since the existence of such an uniformity is required as a justification for drawing the inference in even a single case. This uniformity, therefore, may be ascertained once for all; and if, being ascertained, it can be remembered, it will serve as a formula for making, in particular cases, all such inferences as the previous experience will warrant. But we can only secure its being remembered, or give ourselves even a chance of carrying in our memory any considerable number of such uniformities, by registering them through the medium of permanent signs; which (being, from the nature of the case, signs not of an individual fact, but of an uniformity, that is, of an indefinite number of facts similar to one another) are general signs; universals; general names, and general propositions.
§ 4. And here I cannot omit to notice an oversight committed by some eminent thinkers; who have said that the cause of our using general names is the infinite multitude of individual objects, which, making it impossible to have a name for each, compels us to make one name serve for many. This is a very limited view of the function of general names. Even if there were a name for every individual object, we should require general names as much as we now do. Without them we could not express the result of a single comparison, nor record any one of the uniformities existing in nature; and should be hardly better off in respect to Induction than if we had no names at all. With none but names of individuals, (or in other words, proper names,) we might, by pronouncing the name, suggest the idea of the object, but we could not assert any proposition; except the unmeaning ones formed by predicating two proper names one of another. It is only by means of general names that we can convey any information, predicate any attribute, even of an individual, much more of a class. Rigorously speaking we could get on without any other general names than the abstract names of attributes; all our propositions might be of the form "such an individual object possesses such an attribute," or "such an attribute is always (or never) conjoined with such another attribute." In fact, however, mankind have always given general names to objects as well as attributes, and indeed before attributes: but the general names given to objects imply attributes, derive their whole meaning from attributes; and are chiefly useful as the language by means of which we predicate the attributes which they connote.
It remains to be considered what principles are to be adhered to in giving general names, so that these names, and the general propositions in which they fill a place, may conduce most to the purposes of Induction.
CHAPTER IV.
OF THE REQUISITES OF A PHILOSOPHICAL LANGUAGE, AND THE PRINCIPLES OF DEFINITION.
§ 1. In order that we may possess a language perfectly suitable for the investigation and expression of general truths, there are two principal, and several minor, requisites. The first is, that every general name should have a meaning, steadily fixed, and precisely determined. When, by the fulfilment of this condition, such names as we possess are fitted for the due performance of their functions, the next requisite, and the second in order of importance, is that we should possess a name wherever one is needed; wherever there is anything to be designated by it, which it is of importance to express.
The former of these requisites is that to which our attention will be exclusively directed in the present chapter.
§ 2. Every general name, then, must have a certain and knowable meaning. Now the meaning (as has so often been explained) of a general connotative name, resides in the connotation; in the attribute on account of which, and to express which, the name is given. Thus, the name animal being given to all things which possess the attributes of sensation and voluntary motion, the word connotes those attributes exclusively, and they constitute the whole of its meaning. If the name be abstract, its denotation is the same with the connotation of the corresponding concrete: it designates directly the attribute, which the concrete term implies. To give a precise meaning to general names is, then, to fix with steadiness the attribute or attributes connoted by each concrete general name, and denoted by the corresponding abstract. Since abstract names, in the order of their creation, do not precede but follow concrete ones, as is proved by the etymological fact that they are almost always derived from them; we may consider their meaning as determined by, and dependent on, the meaning of their concrete: and thus the problem of giving a distinct meaning to general language, is all included in that of giving a precise connotation to all concrete general names.
This is not difficult in the case of new names; of the technical terms created by scientific inquirers for the purposes of science or art. But when a name is in common use, the difficulty is greater; the problem in this case not being that of choosing a convenient connotation for the name, but of ascertaining and fixing the connotation with which it is already used. That this can ever be a matter of doubt, is a sort of paradox. But the vulgar (including in that term all who have not accurate habits of thought) seldom know exactly what assertion they intend to make, what common property they mean to express, when they apply the same name to a number of different things. All which the name expresses with them, when they predicate it of an object, is a confused feeling of resemblance between that object and some of the other things which they have been accustomed to denote by the name. They have applied the name Stone to various objects previously seen; they see a new object, which appears to them somewhat like the former, and they call it a stone, without asking themselves in what respect it is like, or what mode or degree of resemblance the best authorities, or even they themselves, require as a warrant for using the name. This rough general impression of resemblance is, however, made up of particular circumstances of resemblance; and into these it is the business of the logician to analyse it; to ascertain what points of resemblance among the different things commonly called by the name, have produced in the common mind this vague feeling of likeness; have given to the things the similarity of aspect, which has made them a class, and has caused the same name to be bestowed upon them.
But though general names are imposed by the vulgar without any more definite connotation than that of a vague resemblance; general propositions come in time to be made, in which predicates are applied to those names, that is, general assertions are made concerning the whole of the things which are denoted by the name. And since by each of these propositions some attribute, more or less precisely conceived, is of course predicated, the ideas of these various attributes thus become associated with the name, and in a sort of uncertain way it comes to connote them; there is a hesitation to apply the name in any new case in which any of the attributes familiarly predicated of the class do not exist. And thus, to common minds, the propositions which they are in the habit of hearing or uttering concerning a class, make up in a loose way a sort of connotation for the class-name. Let us take, for instance, the word Civilized. How few could be found, even among the most educated persons, who would undertake to say exactly what the term Civilized connotes. Yet there is a feeling in the minds of all who use it, that they are using it with a meaning; and this meaning is made up, in a confused manner, of everything which they have heard or read that civilized men, or civilized communities, are, or may be expected to be.
It is at this stage, probably, in the progress of a concrete name, that the corresponding abstract name generally comes into use. Under the notion that the concrete name must of course convey a meaning, or in other words, that there is some property common to all things which it denotes, people give a name to this common property; from the concrete Civilized, they form the abstract Civilization. But since most people have never compared the different things which are called by the concrete name, in such a manner as to ascertain what properties these things have in common, or whether they have any; each is thrown back upon the marks by which he himself has been accustomed to be guided in his application of the term: and these, being merely vague hearsays and current phrases, are not the same in any two persons, nor in the same person at different times. Hence the word (as Civilization, for example) which professes to be the designation of the unknown common property, conveys scarcely to any two minds the same idea. No two persons agree in the things they predicate of it; and when it is itself predicated of anything, no other person knows, nor does the speaker himself know with precision, what he means to assert. Many other words which could be named, as the word honour, or the word gentleman, exemplify this uncertainty still more strikingly.
It needs scarcely be observed, that general propositions of which no one can tell exactly what they assert, cannot possibly have been brought to the test of a correct induction. Whether a name is to be used as an instrument of thinking, or as a means of communicating the result of thought, it is imperative to determine exactly the attribute or attributes which it is to express: to give it, in short, a fixed and ascertained connotation.
§ 3. It would, however, be a complete misunderstanding of the proper office of a logician in dealing with terms already in use, if we were to think that because a name has not at present an ascertained connotation, it is competent to any one to give it such a connotation at his own choice. The meaning of a term actually in use is not an arbitrary quantity to be fixed, but an unknown quantity to be sought.
In the first place, it is obviously desirable to avail ourselves, as far as possible, of the associations already connected with the name; not enjoining the employment of it in a manner which conflicts with all previous habits, and especially not so as to require the rupture of those strongest of all associations between names, which are created by familiarity with propositions in which they are predicated of one another. A philosopher would have little chance of having his example followed, if he were to give such a meaning to his terms as should require us to call the North American Indians a civilized people, or the higher classes in France or England savages; or to say that civilized people live by hunting, and savages by agriculture. Were there no other reason, the extreme difficulty of effecting so complete a revolution in speech would be more than a sufficient one. The endeavour should be, that all generally received propositions into which the term enters, should be at least as true after its meaning is fixed, as they were before; and that the concrete name, therefore, should not receive such a connotation as shall prevent it from denoting things which, in common language, it is currently affirmed of. The fixed and precise connotation which it receives, should not be in deviation from, but in agreement (as far as it goes) with, the vague and fluctuating connotation which the term already had.
To fix the connotation of a concrete name, or the denotation of the corresponding abstract, is to define the name. When this can be done without rendering any received assertions inadmissible, the name can be defined in accordance with its received use, which is vulgarly called defining not the name but the thing. What is meant by the improper expression of defining a thing, (or rather a class of things—for nobody talks of defining an individual,) is to define the name, subject to the condition that it shall denote those things. This, of course, supposes a comparison of the things, feature by feature and property by property, to ascertain what attributes they agree in; and not unfrequently an operation strictly inductive, for the purpose of ascertaining some unobvious agreement, which is the cause of the obvious agreements.
For, in order to give a connotation to a name, consistently with its denoting certain objects, we have to make our selection from among the various attributes in which those objects agree. To ascertain in what they do agree is, therefore, the first logical operation requisite. When this has been done as far as is necessary or practicable, the question arises, which of these common attributes shall be selected to be associated with the name. For if the class which the name denotes be a Kind, the common properties are innumerable; and even if not, they are often extremely numerous. Our choice is first limited by the preference to be given to properties which are well known, and familiarly predicated of the class; but even these are often too numerous to be all included in the definition, and, besides, the properties most generally known may not be those which serve best to mark out the class from all others. We should therefore select from among the common properties, (if among them any such are to be found,) those on which it has been ascertained by experience, or proved by deduction, that many others depend; or at least which are sure marks of them, and from whence, therefore, many others will follow by inference. We thus see that to frame a good definition of a name already in use, is not a matter of choice but of discussion, and discussion not merely respecting the usage of language, but respecting the properties of things, and even the origin of those properties. And hence every enlargement of our knowledge of the objects to which the name is applied, is liable to suggest an improvement in the definition. It is impossible to frame a perfect set of definitions on any subject, until the theory of the subject is perfect: and as science makes progress, its definitions are also progressive.
§ 4. The discussion of Definitions, in so far as it does not turn on the use of words but on the properties of things, Dr. Whewell calls the Explication of Conceptions. The act of ascertaining, better than before, in what particulars any phenomena which are classed together agree, he calls in his technical phraseology, unfolding the general conception in virtue of which they are so classed. Making allowance for what appears to me the darkening and misleading tendency of this mode of expression, several of his remarks are so much to the purpose, that I shall take the liberty of transcribing them.
He observes,[8] that many of the controversies which have had an important share in the formation of the existing body of science, have "assumed the form of a battle of Definitions. For example, the inquiry concerning the laws of falling bodies, led to the question whether the proper definition of a uniform force is that it generates a velocity proportional to the space from rest, or to the time. The controversy of the vis viva was what was the proper definition of the measure of force. A principal question in the classification of minerals is, what is the definition of a mineral species. Physiologists have endeavoured to throw light on their subject by defining organization, or some similar term." Questions of the same nature are still open respecting the definitions of Specific Heat, Latent Heat, Chemical Combination, and Solution.
"It is very important for us to observe, that these controversies have never been questions of insulated and arbitrary definitions, as men seem often tempted to imagine them to have been. In all cases there is a tacit assumption of some proposition which is to be expressed by means of the definition, and which gives it its importance. The dispute concerning the definition thus acquires a real value, and becomes a question concerning true and false. Thus in the discussion of the question, What is a uniform force? it was taken for granted that gravity is a uniform force. In the debate of the vis viva, it was assumed that in the mutual action of bodies the whole effect of the force is unchanged. In the zoological definition of species, (that it consists of individuals which have, or may have, sprung from the same parents,) it is presumed that individuals so related resemble each other more than those which are excluded by such a definition; or, perhaps, that species so defined have permanent and definite differences. A definition of organization, or of some other term, which was not employed to express some principle, would be of no value.
"The establishment, therefore, of a right definition of a term, may be a useful step in the explication of our conceptions; but this will be the case then only when we have under our consideration some proposition in which the term is employed. For then the question really is, how the conception shall be understood and defined in order that the proposition may be true.
"To unfold our conceptions by means of definitions has never been serviceable to science, except when it has been associated with an immediate use of the definitions. The endeavour to define a Uniform Force was combined with the assertion that gravity is a uniform force: the attempt to define Accelerating Force was immediately followed by the doctrine that accelerating forces may be compounded: the process of defining Momentum was connected with the principle that momenta gained and lost are equal: naturalists would have given in vain the definition of Species which we have quoted, if they had not also given the characters of species so separated.... Definition may be the best mode of explaining our conception, but that which alone makes it worth while to explain it in any mode, is the opportunity of using it in the expression of truth. When a definition is propounded to us as a useful step in knowledge, we are always entitled to ask what principle it serves to enunciate."
In giving, then, an exact connotation to the phrase, "an uniform force," the condition was understood, that the phrase should continue to denote gravity. The discussion, therefore, respecting the definition, resolved itself into this question, What is there of an uniform nature in the motions produced by gravity? By observations and comparisons, it was found, that what was uniform in those motions was the ratio of the velocity acquired to the time elapsed; equal velocities being added in equal times. An uniform force, therefore, was defined, a force which adds equal velocities in equal times. So, again, in defining momentum. It was already a received doctrine, that when two objects impinge upon one another, the momentum lost by the one is equal to that gained by the other. This proportion it was deemed necessary to preserve, not from the motive (which operates in many other cases) that it was firmly fixed in popular belief; for the proposition in question had never been heard of by any but the scientifically instructed. But it was felt to contain a truth: even a superficial observation of the phenomena left no doubt that in the propagation of motion from one body to another, there was something of which the one body gained precisely what the other lost; and the word momentum had been invented to express this unknown something. The settlement, therefore, of the definition of momentum, involved the determination of the question, What is that of which a body, when it sets another body in motion, loses exactly as much as it communicates? And when experiment had shown that this something was the product of the velocity of the body by its mass, or quantity of matter, this became the definition of momentum.
The following remarks,[9] therefore, are perfectly just: "The business of definition is part of the business of discovery.... To define, so that our definition shall have any scientific value, requires no small portion of that sagacity by which truth is detected.... When it has been clearly seen what ought to be our definition, it must be pretty well known what truth we have to state. The definition, as well as the discovery, supposes a decided step in our knowledge to have been made. The writers on Logic, in the middle ages, made Definition the last stage in the progress of knowledge; and in this arrangement at least, the history of science, and the philosophy derived from the history, confirm their speculative views." For in order to judge finally how the name which denotes a class may best be defined, we must know all the properties common to the class, and all the relations of causation or dependence among those properties.
If the properties which are fittest to be selected as marks of other common properties are also obvious and familiar, and especially if they bear a great part in producing that general air of resemblance which was the original inducement to the formation of the class, the definition will then be most felicitous. But it is often necessary to define the class by some property not familiarly known, provided that property be the best mark of those which are known. M. de Blainville, for instance, founded his definition of life on the process of decomposition and recomposition which incessantly takes place in every living body, so that the particles composing it are never for two instants the same. This is by no means one of the most obvious properties of living bodies; it might escape altogether the notice of an unscientific observer. Yet great authorities (independently of M. de Blainville, who is himself a first-rate authority) have thought that no other property so well answers the conditions required for the definition.
§ 5. Having laid down the principles which ought for the most part to be observed in attempting to give a precise connotation to a term in use, I must now add, that it is not always practicable to adhere to those principles, and that even when practicable, it is occasionally not desirable.
Cases in which it is impossible to comply with all the conditions of a precise definition of a name in agreement with usage, occur very frequently. There is often no one connotation capable of being given to a word, so that it shall still denote everything it is accustomed to denote; or that all the propositions into which it is accustomed to enter, and which have any foundation in truth, shall remain true. Independently of accidental ambiguities, in which the different meanings have no connexion with one another; it continually happens that a word is used in two or more senses derived from each other, but yet radically distinct. So long as a term is vague, that is, so long as its connotation is not ascertained and permanently fixed, it is constantly liable to be applied by extension from one thing to another, until it reaches things which have little, or even no, resemblance to those which were first designated by it.
Suppose, says Dugald Stewart, in his Philosophical Essays,[10] "that the letters A, B, C, D, E, denote a series of objects; that A possesses some one quality in common with B; B a quality in common with C; C a quality in common with D; D a quality in common with E; while at the same time, no quality can be found which belongs in common to any three objects in the series. Is it not conceivable, that the affinity between A and B may produce a transference of the name of the first to the second; and that, in consequence of the other affinities which connect the remaining objects together, the same name may pass in succession from B to C; from C to D; and from D to E? In this manner, a common appellation will arise between A and E, although the two objects may, in their nature and properties, be so widely distant from each other, that no stretch of imagination can conceive how the thoughts were led from the former to the latter. The transitions, nevertheless, may have been all so easy and gradual, that, were they successfully detected by the fortunate ingenuity of a theorist, we should instantly recognise, not only the verisimilitude, but the truth of the conjecture: in the same way as we admit, with the confidence of intuitive conviction, the certainty of the well-known etymological process which connects the Latin preposition e or ex with the English substantive stranger, the moment that the intermediate links of the chain are submitted to our examination."[11]
The applications which a word acquires by this gradual extension of it from one set of objects to another, Stewart, adopting an expression from Mr. Payne Knight, calls its transitive applications; and after briefly illustrating such of them as are the result of local or casual associations, he proceeds as follows:[12]—
"But although by far the greater part of the transitive or derivative applications of words depend on casual and unaccountable caprices of the feelings or the fancy, there are certain cases in which they open a very interesting field of philosophical speculation. Such are those, in which an analogous transference of the corresponding term may be remarked universally, or very generally, in other languages; and in which, of course, the uniformity of the result must be ascribed to the essential principles of the human frame. Even in such cases, however, it will by no means be always found, on examination, that the various applications of the same term have arisen from any common quality or qualities in the objects to which they relate. In the greater number of instances, they may be traced to some natural and universal associations of ideas, founded in the common faculties, common organs, and common condition of the human race.... According to the different degrees of intimacy and strength in the associations on which the transitions of language are founded, very different effects may be expected to arise. Where the association is slight and casual, the several meanings will remain distinct from each other, and will often, in process of time, assume the appearance of capricious varieties in the use of the same arbitrary sign. Where the association is so natural and habitual as to become virtually indissoluble, the transitive meanings will coalesce in one complex conception; and every new transition will become a more comprehensive generalization of the term in question."
I solicit particular attention to the law of mind expressed in the last sentence, and which is the source of the perplexity so often experienced in detecting these transitions of meaning. Ignorance of that law is the shoal on which some of the most powerful intellects which have adorned the human race have been stranded. The inquiries of Plato into the definitions of some of the most general terms of moral speculation are characterized by Bacon as a far nearer approach to a true inductive method than is elsewhere to be found among the ancients, and are, indeed, almost perfect examples of the preparatory process of comparison and abstraction: but, from being unaware of the law just mentioned, he often wasted the powers of this great logical instrument on inquiries in which it could realize no result, since the phenomena, whose common properties he so elaborately endeavoured to detect, had not really any common properties. Bacon himself fell into the same error in his speculations on the nature of heat, in which he evidently confounded under the name hot, classes of phenomena which had no property in common. Stewart certainly overstates the matter when he speaks of "a prejudice which has descended to modern times from the scholastic ages, that when a word admits of a variety of significations, these different significations must all be species of the same genus, and must consequently include some essential idea common to every individual to which the generic term can be applied:"[13] for both Aristotle and his followers were well aware that there are such things as ambiguities of language, and delighted in distinguishing them. But they never suspected ambiguity in the cases where (as Stewart remarks) the association on which the transition of meaning was founded is so natural and habitual, that the two meanings blend together in the mind, and a real transition becomes an apparent generalization. Accordingly they wasted infinite pains in endeavouring to find a definition which would serve for several distinct meanings at once: as in an instance noticed by Stewart himself, that of "causation; the ambiguity of the word which, in the Greek language, corresponds to the English word cause, having suggested to them the vain attempt of tracing the common idea which, in the case of any effect, belongs to the efficient, to the matter, to the form, and to the end. The idle generalities" (he adds) "we meet with in other philosophers, about the ideas of the good, the fit, and the becoming, have taken their rise from the same undue influence of popular epithets on the speculations of the learned."[14]
Among the words which have undergone so many successive transitions of meaning that every trace of a property common to all the things they are applied to, or at least common and also peculiar to those things, has been lost, Stewart considers the word Beautiful to be one. And (without attempting to decide a question which in no respect belongs to logic) I cannot but feel, with him, considerable doubt, whether the word beautiful connotes the same property when we speak of a beautiful colour, a beautiful face, a beautiful scene, a beautiful character, and a beautiful poem. The word was doubtless extended from one of these objects to another on account of a resemblance between them, or more probably, between the emotions they excited; and, by this progressive extension, it has at last reached things very remote from those objects of sight to which there is no doubt that it was first appropriated; and it is at least questionable whether there is now any property common to all the things which, consistently with usage, may be called beautiful, except the property of agreeableness, which the term certainly does connote, but which cannot be all that people usually intend to express by it, since there are many agreeable things which are never called beautiful. If such be the case, it is impossible to give to the word Beautiful any fixed connotation, such that it shall denote all the objects which in common use it now denotes, but no others. A fixed connotation, however, it ought to have; for, so long as it has not, it is unfit to be used as a scientific term, and is a perpetual source of false analogies and erroneous generalizations.
This, then, constitutes a case in exemplification of our remark, that even when there is a property common to all the things denoted by a name, to erect that property into the definition and exclusive connotation of the name is not always desirable. The various things called beautiful unquestionably resemble one another in being agreeable; but to make this the definition of beauty, and so extend the word Beautiful to all agreeable things, would be to drop altogether a portion of meaning which the word really, though indistinctly, conveys, and to do what depends on us towards causing those qualities of the objects which the word previously, though vaguely, pointed at, to be overlooked and forgotten. It is better, in such a case, to give a fixed connotation to the term by restricting, than by extending its use; rather excluding from the epithet Beautiful some things to which it is commonly considered applicable, than leaving out of its connotation any of the qualities by which, though occasionally lost sight of, the general mind may have been habitually guided in the commonest and most interesting applications of the term. For there is no question that when people call anything beautiful, they think they are asserting more than that it is merely agreeable. They think they are ascribing a peculiar sort of agreeableness, analogous to that which they find in some other of the things to which they are accustomed to apply the same name. If, therefore, there be any peculiar sort of agreeableness which is common though not to all, yet to the principal things which are called beautiful, it is better to limit the denotation of the term to those things, than to leave that kind of quality without a term to connote it, and thereby divert attention from its peculiarities.
§ 6. The last remark exemplifies a rule of terminology, which is of great importance, and which has hardly yet been recognised as a rule, but by a few thinkers of the present century. In attempting to rectify the use of a vague term by giving it a fixed connotation, we must take care not to discard (unless advisedly, and on the ground of a deeper knowledge of the subject) any portion of the connotation which the word, in however indistinct a manner, previously carried with it. For otherwise language loses one of its inherent and most valuable properties, that of being the conservator of ancient experience; the keeper-alive of those thoughts and observations of former ages, which may be alien to the tendencies of the passing time. This function of language is so often overlooked or undervalued, that a few observations on it appear to be extremely required.
Even when the connotation of a term has been accurately fixed, and still more if it has been left in the state of a vague unanalysed feeling of resemblance; there is a constant tendency in the word, through familiar use, to part with a portion of its connotation. It is a well-known law of the mind, that a word originally associated with a very complex cluster of ideas, is far from calling up all those ideas in the mind, every time the word is used: it calls up only one or two, from which the mind runs on by fresh associations to another set of ideas, without waiting for the suggestion of the remainder of the complex cluster. If this were not the case, processes of thought could not take place with anything like the rapidity which we know they possess. Very often, indeed, when we are employing a word in our mental operations, we are so far from waiting until the complex idea which corresponds to the meaning of the word is consciously brought before us in all its parts, that we run on to new trains of ideas by the other associations which the mere word excites, without having realized in our imagination any part whatever of the meaning: thus using the word, and even using it well and accurately, and carrying on important processes of reasoning by means of it, in an almost mechanical manner; so much so, that some metaphysicians, generalizing from an extreme case, have fancied that all reasoning is but the mechanical use of a set of terms according to a certain form. We may discuss and settle the most important interests of towns or nations, by the application of general theorems or practical maxims previously laid down, without having had consciously suggested to us, once in the whole process, the houses and green fields, the thronged market-places and domestic hearths, of which not only those towns and nations consist, but which the words town and nation confessedly mean.
Since, then, general names come in this manner to be used (and even to do a portion of their work well) without suggesting to the mind the whole of their meaning, and often with the suggestion of a very small, or no part at all of that meaning; we cannot wonder that words so used come in time to be no longer capable of suggesting any other of the ideas appropriated to them, than those with which the association is most immediate and strongest, or most kept up by the incidents of life: the remainder being lost altogether; unless the mind, by often consciously dwelling on them, keeps up the association. Words naturally retain much more of their meaning to persons of active imagination, who habitually represent to themselves things in the concrete, with the detail which belongs to them in the actual world. To minds of a different description, the only antidote to this corruption of language is predication. The habit of predicating of the name, all the various properties which it originally connoted, keeps up the association between the name and those properties.
But in order that it may do so, it is necessary that the predicates should themselves retain their association with the properties which they severally connote. For the propositions cannot keep the meaning of the words alive, if the meaning of the propositions themselves should die. And nothing is more common than for propositions to be mechanically repeated, mechanically retained in the memory, and their truth undoubtingly assented to and relied on, while yet they carry no meaning distinctly home to the mind; and while the matter of fact or law of nature which they originally expressed is as much lost sight of, and practically disregarded, as if it never had been heard of at all. In those subjects which are at the same time familiar and complicated, and especially in those which are so in as great a degree as moral and social subjects are, it is a matter of common remark how many important propositions are believed and repeated from habit, while no account could be given, and no sense is practically manifested, of the truths which they convey. Hence it is, that the traditional maxims of old experience, though seldom questioned, have often so little effect on the conduct of life; because their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, until personal experience has brought it home. And thus also it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have manifested (after the association of that meaning with the verbal formulas has ceased to be kept up by the controversies which accompanied their first introduction) a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas; which tendency, all the efforts of an education expressly and skilfully directed to keeping the meaning alive, are barely sufficient to counteract.
Considering, then, that the human mind, in different generations, occupies itself with different things, and in one age is led by the circumstances which surround it to fix more of its attention upon one of the properties of a thing, in another age upon another; it is natural and inevitable that in every age a certain portion of our recorded and traditional knowledge, not being continually suggested by the pursuits and inquiries with which mankind are at that time engrossed, should fall asleep, as it were, and fade from the memory. It would be in danger of being totally lost, if the propositions or formulas, the results of the previous experience, did not remain, as forms of words it may be, but of words that once really conveyed, and are still supposed to convey, a meaning: which meaning, though suspended, may be historically traced, and when suggested, may be recognised by minds of the necessary endowments as being still matter of fact, or truth. While the formulas remain, the meaning may at any time revive; and as on the one hand the formulas progressively lose the meaning they were intended to convey, so, on the other, when this forgetfulness has reached its height and begun to produce obvious consequences, minds arise which from the contemplation of the formulas rediscover the truth, when truth it was, which was contained in them, and announce it again to mankind, not as a discovery, but as the meaning of that which they have been taught, and still profess to believe.
Thus there is a perpetual oscillation in spiritual truths, and in spiritual doctrines of any significance, even when not truths. Their meaning is almost always in a process either of being lost or of being recovered. Whoever has attended to the history of the more serious convictions of mankind—of the opinions by which the general conduct of their lives is, or as they conceive ought to be, more especially regulated—is aware that even when recognising verbally the same doctrines, they attach to them at different periods a greater or a less quantity, and even a different kind, of meaning. The words in their original acceptation connoted, and the propositions expressed, a complication of outward facts and inward feelings, to different portions of which the general mind is more particularly alive in different generations of mankind. To common minds, only that portion of the meaning is in each generation suggested, of which that generation possesses the counterpart in its own habitual experience. But the words and propositions lie ready to suggest to any mind duly prepared the remainder of the meaning. Such individual minds are almost always to be found: and the lost meaning, revived by them, again by degrees works its way into the general mind.
The arrival of this salutary reaction may however be materially retarded, by the shallow conceptions and incautious proceedings of mere logicians. It sometimes happens that towards the close of the downward period, when the words have lost part of their significance, and have not yet begun to recover it, persons arise whose leading and favourite idea is the importance of clear conceptions and precise thought, and the necessity, therefore, of definite language. These persons, in examining the old formulas, easily perceive that words are used in them without a meaning; and if they are not the sort of persons who are capable of rediscovering the lost signification, they naturally enough dismiss the formula, and define the name without reference to it. In so doing they fasten down the name to what it connotes in common use at the time when it conveys the smallest quantity of meaning; and introduce the practice of employing it, consistently and uniformly, according to that connotation. The word in this way acquires an extent of denotation far beyond what it had before; it becomes extended to many things to which it was previously, in appearance capriciously, refused. Of the propositions in which it was formerly used, those which were true in virtue of the forgotten part of its meaning are now, by the clearer light which the definition diffuses, seen not to be true according to the definition; which, however, is the recognised and sufficiently correct expression of all that is perceived to be in the mind of any one by whom the term is used at the present day. The ancient formulas are consequently treated as prejudices; and people are no longer taught as before, though not to understand them, yet to believe that there is truth in them. They no longer remain in the general mind surrounded by respect, and ready at any time to suggest their original meaning. Whatever truths they contain are not only, in these circumstances, rediscovered far more slowly, but, when rediscovered, the prejudice with which novelties are regarded is now, in some degree at least, against them, instead of being on their side.
An example may make these remarks more intelligible. In all ages, except where moral speculation has been silenced by outward compulsion, or where the feelings which prompt to it still continue to be satisfied by the traditional doctrines of an established faith, one of the subjects which have most occupied the minds of thinking persons is the inquiry, What is virtue? or, What is a virtuous character? Among the different theories on the subject which have, at different times, grown up and obtained partial currency, every one of which reflected as in the clearest mirror, the express image of the age which gave it birth; there was one, according to which virtue consists in a correct calculation of our own personal interests, either in this world only, or also in another. To make this theory plausible, it was of course necessary that the only beneficial actions which people in general were accustomed to see, or were therefore accustomed to praise, should be such as were, or at least might without contradicting obvious facts be supposed to be, the result of a prudential regard to self-interest; so that the words really connoted no more, in common acceptation, than was set down in the definition.
Suppose, now, that the partisans of this theory had contrived to introduce a consistent and undeviating use of the term according to this definition. Suppose that they had seriously endeavoured, and had succeeded in the endeavour, to banish the word disinterestedness from the language; had obtained the disuse of all expressions attaching odium to selfishness or commendation to self-sacrifice, or which implied generosity or kindness to be anything but doing a benefit in order to receive a greater personal advantage in return. Need we say, that this abrogation of the old formulas for the sake of preserving clear ideas and consistency of thought, would have been a great evil? while the very inconsistency incurred by the coexistence of the formulas with philosophical opinions which seemed to condemn them as absurdities, operated as a stimulus to the re-examination of the subject; and thus the very doctrines originating in the oblivion into which a part of the truth had fallen, were rendered indirectly, but powerfully, instrumental to its revival.
The doctrine of the Coleridge school, that the language of any people among whom culture is of old date, is a sacred deposit, the property of all ages, and which no one age should consider itself empowered to alter—borders indeed, as thus expressed, on an extravagance; but it is grounded on a truth, frequently overlooked by that class of logicians who think more of having a clear than of having a comprehensive meaning; and who perceive that every age is adding to the truths which it has received from its predecessors, but fail to see that a counter process of losing truths already possessed, is also constantly going on, and requiring the most sedulous attention to counteract it. Language is the depository of the accumulated body of experience to which all former ages have contributed their part, and which is the inheritance of all yet to come. We have no right to prevent ourselves from transmitting to posterity a larger portion of this inheritance than we may ourselves have profited by. However much we may be able to improve on the conclusions of our forefathers, we ought to be careful not inadvertently to let any of their premises slip through our fingers. It may be good to alter the meaning of a word, but it is bad to let any part of the meaning drop. Whoever seeks to introduce a more correct use of a term with which important associations are connected, should be required to possess an accurate acquaintance with the history of the particular word, and of the opinions which in different stages of its progress it served to express. To be qualified to define the name, we must know all that has ever been known of the properties of the class of objects which are, or originally were, denoted by it. For if we give it a meaning according to which any proposition will be false which has ever been generally held to be true, it is incumbent on us to be sure that we know and have considered all which those, who believed the proposition, understood by it.
CHAPTER V.
ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE VARIATIONS IN THE MEANING OF TERMS.
§ 1. It is not only in the mode which has now been pointed out, namely by gradual inattention to a portion of the ideas conveyed, that words in common use are liable to shift their connotation. The truth is, that the connotation of such words is perpetually varying; as might be expected from the manner in which words in common use acquire their connotation. A technical term, invented for purposes of art or science, has, from the first, the connotation given to it by its inventor; but a name which is in every one's mouth before any one thinks of defining it, derives its connotation only from the circumstances which are habitually brought to mind when it is pronounced. Among these circumstances, the properties common to the things denoted by the name, have naturally a principal place; and would have the sole place, if language were regulated by convention rather than by custom and accident. But besides these common properties, which if they exist are certainly present whenever the name is employed, any other circumstance may casually be found along with it, so frequently as to become associated with it in the same manner, and as strongly, as the common properties themselves. In proportion as this association forms itself, people give up using the name in cases in which those casual circumstances do not exist. They prefer using some other name, or the same name with some adjunct, rather than employ an expression which will call up an idea they do not want to excite. The circumstance originally casual, thus becomes regularly a part of the connotation of the word.
It is this continual incorporation of circumstances originally accidental, into the permanent signification of words, which is the cause that there are so few exact synonymes. It is this also which renders the dictionary meaning of a word, by universal remark so imperfect an exponent of its real meaning. The dictionary meaning is marked out in a broad, blunt way, and probably includes all that was originally necessary for the correct employment of the term; but in process of time so many collateral associations adhere to words, that whoever should attempt to use them with no other guide than the dictionary, would confound a thousand nice distinctions and subtle shades of meaning which dictionaries take no account of; as we notice in the use of a language in conversation or writing by a foreigner not thoroughly master of it. The history of a word, by showing the causes which determine its use, is in these cases a better guide to its employment than any definition; for definitions can only show its meaning at the particular time, or at most the series of its successive meanings, but its history may show the law by which the succession was produced. The word gentleman, for instance, to the correct employment of which a dictionary would be no guide, originally meant simply a man born in a certain rank. From this it came by degrees to connote all such qualities or adventitious circumstances as were usually found to belong to persons of that rank. This consideration at once explains why in one of its vulgar acceptations it means any one who lives without labour, in another without manual labour, and in its more elevated signification it has in every age signified the conduct, character, habits, and outward appearance, in whomsoever found, which, according to the ideas of that age, belonged or were expected to belong to persons born and educated in a high social position.
It continually happens that of two words, whose dictionary meanings are either the same or very slightly different, one will be the proper word to use in one set of circumstances, another in another, without its being possible to show how the custom of so employing them originally grew up. The accident that one of the words was used and not the other on a particular occasion or in a particular social circle, will be sufficient to produce so strong an association between the word and some speciality of circumstances, that mankind abandon the use of it in any other case, and the speciality becomes part of its signification. The tide of custom first drifts the word on the shore of a particular meaning, then retires and leaves it there.
An instance in point is the remarkable change which, in the English language at least, has taken place in the signification of the word loyalty. That word originally meant in English, as it still means in the language from whence it came, fair, open dealing, and fidelity to engagements; in that sense the quality it expressed was part of the ideal chivalrous or knightly character. By what process, in England, the term became restricted to the single case of fidelity to the throne, I am not sufficiently versed in the history of courtly language to be able to pronounce. The interval between a loyal chevalier and a loyal subject is certainly great. I can only suppose that the word was, at some period, the favourite term at court to express fidelity to the oath of allegiance; until at length those who wished to speak of any other, and as it was probably deemed, inferior sort of fidelity, either did not venture to use so dignified a term, or found it convenient to employ some other in order to avoid being misunderstood.
§ 2. Cases are not unfrequent in which a circumstance, at first casually incorporated into the connotation of a word which originally had no reference to it, in time wholly supersedes the original meaning, and becomes not merely a part of the connotation, but the whole of it. This is exemplified in the word pagan, paganus; which originally, as its etymology imports, was equivalent to villager; the inhabitant of a pagus, or village. At a particular era in the extension of Christianity over the Roman empire, the adherents of the old religion, and the villagers or country people, were nearly the same body of individuals, the inhabitants of the towns having been earliest converted; as in our own day, and at all times, the greater activity of social intercourse renders them the earliest recipients of new opinions and modes, while old habits and prejudices linger longest among the country people: not to mention that the towns were more immediately under the direct influence of the government, which at that time had embraced Christianity. From this casual coincidence, the word paganus carried with it, and began more and more steadily to suggest, the idea of a worshipper of the ancient divinities; until at length it suggested that idea so forcibly that people who did not desire to suggest the idea avoided using the word. But when paganus had come to connote heathenism, the very unimportant circumstance, with reference to that fact, of the place of residence, was soon disregarded in the employment of the word. As there was seldom any occasion for making separate assertions respecting heathens who lived in the country, there was no need for a separate word to denote them; and pagan came not only to mean heathen, but to mean that exclusively.
[14] Ibid. 215.
[9] Nov. Org. Renov., pp. 39, 40.
[5] Professor Bain.
[11] "E, ex, extra, extraneus, étranger, stranger."
[4] Other examples of inappropriate conceptions are given by Dr. Whewell (Phil. Ind. Sc. ii. 185) as follows:—"Aristotle and his followers endeavoured in vain to account for the mechanical relation of forces in the lever, by applying the inappropriate geometrical conceptions of the properties of the circle: they failed in explaining the form of the luminous spot made by the sun shining through a hole, because they applied the inappropriate conception of a circular quality in the sun's light: they speculated to no purpose about the elementary composition of bodies, because they assumed the inappropriate conception of likeness between the elements and the compound, instead of the genuine notion of elements merely determining the qualities of the compound." But in these cases there is more than an inappropriate conception; there is a false conception; one which has no prototype in nature, nothing corresponding to it in facts. This is evident in the last two examples, and is equally true in the first; the "properties of the circle" which were referred to, being purely fantastical. There is, therefore, an error beyond the wrong choice of a principle of generalization; there is a false assumption of matters of fact. The attempt is made to resolve certain laws of nature into a more general law, that law not being one which, though real, is inappropriate, but one wholly imaginary.
[6] This sentence having been erroneously understood as if I had meant to assert that belief is nothing but an irresistible association, I think it necessary to observe that I express no theory respecting the ultimate analysis either of reasoning or of belief, two of the most obscure points in analytical psychology. I am speaking not of the powers themselves, but of the previous conditions necessary to enable those powers to exert themselves: of which conditions I am contending that language is not one, senses and association being sufficient without it.
[10] P. 217, 4to edition.
[13] Essays, p. 214.
[8] Novum Organum Renovatum, pp. 35-37.
[12] P. 226-7.
[7] Mr. Bailey agrees with me in thinking that whenever "from something actually present to my senses conjoined with past experience, I feel satisfied that something has happened, or will happen, or is happening, beyond the sphere of my personal observation," I may with strict propriety be said to reason: and of course to reason inductively, for demonstrative reasoning is excluded by the circumstances of the case. (The Theory of Reasoning, 2nd ed. p. 27.)
A case still more familiar to most readers is that of the word villain or villein. This term, as everybody knows, had in the middle ages a connotation as strictly defined as a word could have, being the proper legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal bondage. The scorn of the semibarbarous military aristocracy for these their abject dependants, rendered the act of likening any person to this class of people a mark of the greatest contumely: the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the degrading situation in which they were held, were often not unjustly imputed to them. These circumstances combined to attach to the term villain, ideas of crime and guilt in so forcible a manner, that the application of the epithet even to those to whom it legally belonged became an affront, and was abstained from whenever no affront was intended. From that time guilt was part of the connotation; and soon became the whole of it, since mankind were not prompted by any urgent motive to continue making a distinction in their language between bad men of servile station and bad men of any other rank in life.
These and similar instances in which the original signification of a term is totally lost—another and an entirely distinct meaning being first engrafted upon the former, and finally substituted for it—afford examples of the double movement which is always taking place in language: two counter-movements, one of Generalization, by which words are perpetually losing portions of their connotation, and becoming of less meaning and more general acceptation; the other of Specialization, by which other, or even these same words, are continually taking on fresh connotation; acquiring additional meaning, by being restricted in their employment to a part only of the occasions on which they might properly be used before. This double movement is of sufficient importance in the natural history of language, (to which natural history the artificial modifications ought always to have some degree of reference,) to justify our dwelling a little longer on the nature of the twofold phenomenon, and the causes to which it owes its existence.
§ 3. To begin with the movement of generalization. It is unnecessary to dwell on the changes in the meaning of names which take place merely from their being used ignorantly, by persons who, not having properly mastered the received connotation of a word, apply it in a looser and wider sense than belongs to it. This, however, is a real source of alterations in the language; for when a word, from being often employed in cases where one of the qualities which it connotes does not exist, ceases to suggest that quality with certainty, then even those who are under no mistake as to the proper meaning of the word, prefer expressing that meaning in some other way, and leave the original word to its fate. The word 'Squire as standing for an owner of a landed estate; Parson, as denoting not the rector of the parish, but clergymen in general; Artist, to denote only a painter or sculptor; are cases in point.[15] Independently, however, of the generalization of names through their ignorant misuse, there is a tendency in the same direction, consistently with a perfect knowledge of their meaning; arising from the fact, that the number of things known to us, and of which we feel a desire to speak, multiply faster than the names for them. Except on subjects for which there has been constructed a scientific terminology, with which unscientific persons do not meddle, great difficulty is generally found in bringing a new name into use; and independently of that difficulty, it is natural to prefer giving to a new object a name which at least expresses its resemblance to something already known, since by predicating of it a name entirely new we at first convey no information. In this manner the name of a species often becomes the name of a genus; as salt, for example, or oil; the former of which words originally denoted only the muriate of soda, the latter, as its etymology indicates, only olive oil; but which now denote large and diversified classes of substances resembling these in some of their qualities, and connote only those common qualities, instead of the whole of the distinctive properties of olive oil and sea salt. The words glass and soap are used by modern chemists in a similar manner, to denote genera of which the substances vulgarly so called are single species. And it often happens, as in those instances, that the term keeps its special signification in addition to its more general one, and becomes ambiguous, that is, two names instead of one.
These changes, by which words in ordinary use become more and more generalized, and less and less expressive, take place in a still greater degree with the words which express the complicated phenomena of mind and society. Historians, travellers, and in general those who speak or write concerning moral and social phenomena with which they are not familiarly acquainted, are the great agents in this modification of language. The vocabulary of all except unusually instructed as well as thinking persons, is, on such subjects, eminently scanty. They have a certain small set of words to which they are accustomed, and which they employ to express phenomena the most heterogeneous, because they have never sufficiently analysed the facts to which those words correspond in their own country, to have attached perfectly definite ideas to the words. The first English conquerors of Bengal, for example, carried with them the phrase landed proprietor into a country where the rights of individuals over the soil were extremely different in degree, and even in nature, from those recognised in England. Applying the term with all its English associations in such a state of things; to one who had only a limited right they gave an absolute right, from another because he had not an absolute right they took away all right, drove whole classes of people to ruin and despair, filled the country with banditti, created a feeling that nothing was secure, and produced, with the best intentions, a disorganization of society which had not been produced in that country by the most ruthless of its barbarian invaders. Yet the usage of persons capable of so gross a misapprehension, determines the meaning of language; and the words they thus misuse grow in generality, until the instructed are obliged to acquiesce; and to employ those words (first freeing them from vagueness by giving them a definite connotation) as generic terms, subdividing the genera into species.
§ 4. While the more rapid growth of ideas than of names thus creates a perpetual necessity for making the same names serve, even if imperfectly, on a greater number of occasions; a counter-operation is going on, by which names become on the contrary restricted to fewer occasions, by taking on, as it were, additional connotation, from circumstances not originally included in the meaning, but which have become connected with it in the mind by some accidental cause. We have seen above, in the words pagan and villain, remarkable examples of the specialization of the meaning of words from casual associations, as well as of the generalization of it in a new direction, which often follows.
Similar specializations are of frequent occurrence in the history even of scientific nomenclature. "It is by no means uncommon," says Dr. Paris, in his Pharmacologia,[16] "to find a word which is used to express general characters subsequently become the name of a specific substance in which such characters are predominant; and we shall find that some important anomalies in nomenclature may be thus explained. The term Αρσενίκον, from which the word Arsenic is derived, was an ancient epithet applied to those natural substances which possessed strong and acrimonious properties, and as the poisonous quality of arsenic was found to be remarkably powerful, the term was especially applied to Orpiment, the form in which this metal most usually occurred. So the term Verbena (quasi Herbena) originally denoted all those herbs that were held sacred on account of their being employed in the rites of sacrifice, as we learn from the poets; but as one herb was usually adopted upon these occasions, the word Verbena came to denote that particular herb only, and it is transmitted to us to this day under the same title, viz. Verbena or Vervain, and indeed until lately it enjoyed the medical reputation which its sacred origin conferred upon it, for it was worn suspended around the neck as an amulet. Vitriol, in the original application of the word, denoted any crystalline body with a certain degree of transparency (vitrum); it is hardly necessary to observe that the term is now appropriated to a particular species: in the same manner, Bark, which is a general term, is applied to express one genus, and by way of eminence, it has the article The prefixed, as The bark: the same observation will apply to the word Opium, which, in its primitive sense, signifies any juice (ὀπὸς, Succus), while it now only denotes one species, viz. that of the poppy. So, again, Elaterium was used by Hippocrates to signify various internal applications, especially purgatives, of a violent and drastic nature (from the word ἐλαύνω, agito, moveo, stimulo), but by succeeding authors it was exclusively applied to denote the active matter which subsides from the juice of the wild cucumber. The word Fecula, again, originally meant to imply any substance which was derived by spontaneous subsidence from a liquid (from fæx, the grounds or settlement of any liquor); afterwards it was applied to Starch, which is deposited in this manner by agitating the flour of wheat in water; and lastly, it has been applied to a peculiar vegetable principle, which, like starch, is insoluble in cold, but completely soluble in boiling water, with which it forms a gelatinous solution. This indefinite meaning of the word fecula has created numerous mistakes in pharmaceutic chemistry; Elaterium, for instance, is said to be fecula, and, in the original sense of the word, it is properly so called, inasmuch as it is procured from a vegetable juice by spontaneous subsidence, but in the limited and modern acceptation of the term, it conveys an erroneous idea; for instead of the active principle of the juice residing in fecula, it is a peculiar proximate principle, sui generis, to which I have ventured to bestow the name of Elatin. For the same reason, much doubt and obscurity involve the meaning of the word Extract, because it is applied generally to any substance obtained by the evaporation of a vegetable solution, and specifically to a peculiar proximate principle, possessed of certain characters, by which it is distinguished from every other elementary body."
A generic term is always liable to become thus limited to a single species, or even individual, if people have occasion to think and speak of that individual or species much oftener than of anything else which is contained in the genus. Thus by cattle, a stage-coachman will understand horses; beasts, in the language of agriculturists, stands for oxen; and birds, with some sportsmen, for partridges only. The law of language which operates in these trivial instances, is the very same in conformity to which the terms Θεός, Deus, and God, were adopted from Polytheism by Christianity, to express the single object of its own adoration. Almost all the terminology of the Christian Church is made up of words originally used in a much more general acceptation: Ecclesia, Assembly; Bishop, Episcopus, Overseer; Priest, Presbyter, Elder; Deacon, Diaconus, Administrator; Sacrament, a vow of allegiance; Evangelium, good tidings; and some words, as Minister, are still used both in the general and in the limited sense. It would be interesting to trace the progress by which author came, in its most familiar sense, to signify a writer, and ποίητης, or maker, a poet.
Of the incorporation into the meaning of a term, of circumstances accidentally connected with it at some particular period, as in the case of Pagan, instances might easily be multiplied. Physician (φυσίκος, or naturalist) became, in England, synonymous with a healer of diseases, because until a comparatively late period medical practitioners were the only naturalists. Clerc, or clericus, a scholar, came to signify an ecclesiastic, because the clergy were for many centuries the only scholars.
Of all ideas, however, the most liable to cling by association to anything with which they have ever been connected by proximity, are those of our pleasures and pains, or of the things which we habitually contemplate as sources of our pleasures or pains. The additional connotation, therefore, which a word soonest and most readily takes on, is that of agreeableness or painfulness, in their various kinds and degrees: of being a good or bad thing; desirable or to be avoided; an object of hatred, of dread, contempt, admiration, hope, or love. Accordingly there is hardly a single name, expressive of any moral or social fact calculated to call forth strong affections either of a favourable or of a hostile nature, which does not carry with it decidedly and irresistibly a connotation of those strong affections, or, at the least, of approbation or censure; insomuch that to employ those names in conjunction with others by which the contrary sentiments were expressed, would produce the effect of a paradox, or even a contradiction in terms. The baneful influence of a connotation thus acquired, on the prevailing habits of thought, especially in morals and politics, has been well pointed out on many occasions by Bentham. It gives rise to the fallacy of "question-begging names." The very property which we are inquiring whether a thing possesses or not, has become so associated with the name of the thing as to be part of its meaning, insomuch that by merely uttering the name we assume the point which was to be made out: one of the most frequent sources of apparently self-evident propositions.
Without any further multiplication of examples to illustrate the changes which usage is continually making in the signification of terms, I shall add, as a practical rule, that the logician, not being able to prevent such transformations, should submit to them with a good grace when they are irrevocably effected, and if a definition is necessary, define the word according to its new meaning; retaining the former as a second signification, if it is needed, and if there is any chance of being able to preserve it either in the language of philosophy or in common use. Logicians cannot make the meaning of any but scientific terms: that of all other words is made by the collective human race. But logicians can ascertain clearly what it is which, working obscurely, has guided the general mind to a particular employment of a name; and when they have found this, they can clothe it in such distinct and permanent terms, that mankind shall see the meaning which before they only felt, and shall not suffer it to be afterwards forgotten or misapprehended.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PRINCIPLES OF A PHILOSOPHICAL LANGUAGE FURTHER CONSIDERED.
§ 1. We have, thus far, considered only one of the requisites of a language adapted for the investigation of truth; that its terms shall each of them convey a determinate and unmistakeable meaning. There are, however, as we have already remarked, other requisites; some of them important only in the second degree, but one which is fundamental, and barely yields in point of importance, if it yields at all, to the quality which we have already discussed at so much length. That the language may be fitted for its purposes, not only should every word perfectly express its meaning, but there should be no important meaning without its word. Whatever we have occasion to think of often, and for scientific purposes, ought to have a name appropriated to it.
This requisite of philosophical language may be considered under three different heads; that number of separate conditions being involved in it.
§ 2. First: there ought to be all such names, as are needful for making such a record of individual observations that the words of the record shall exactly show what fact it is which has been observed. In other words, there should be an accurate Descriptive Terminology.
The only things which we can observe directly being our own sensations, or other feelings, a complete descriptive language would be one in which there should be a name for every variety of elementary sensation or feeling. Combinations of sensations or feelings may always be described, if we have a name for each of the elementary feelings which compose them; but brevity of description, and clearness (which often depends very much on brevity,) are greatly promoted by giving distinctive names not to the elements alone, but also to all combinations which are of frequent recurrence. On this occasion I cannot do better than quote from Dr. Whewell[17] some of the excellent remarks which he has made on this important branch of our subject.
"The meaning of [descriptive] technical terms can be fixed in the first instance only by convention, and can be made intelligible only by presenting to the senses that which the terms are to signify. The knowledge of a colour by its name can only be taught through the eye. No description can convey to a hearer what we mean by apple-green or French-grey. It might, perhaps, be supposed that, in the first example, the term apple, referring to so familiar an object, sufficiently suggests the colour intended. But it may easily be seen that this is not true; for apples are of many different hues of green, and it is only by a conventional selection that we can appropriate the term to one special shade. When this appropriation is once made, the term refers to the sensation, and not to the parts of the term; for these enter into the compound merely as a help to the memory, whether the suggestion be a natural connexion as in 'apple-green,' or a casual one as in 'French-grey.' In order to derive due advantage from technical terms of this kind, they must be associated immediately with the perception to which they belong; and not connected with it through the vague usages of common language. The memory must retain the sensation; and the technical word must be understood as directly as the most familiar word, and more distinctly. When we find such terms as tin-white or pinchbeck-brown, the metallic colour so denoted ought to start up in our memory without delay or search.
"This, which it is most important to recollect with respect to the simpler properties of bodies, as colour and form, is no less true with respect to more compound notions. In all cases the term is fixed to a peculiar meaning by convention; and the student, in order to use the word, must be completely familiar with the convention, so that he has no need to frame conjectures from the word itself. Such conjectures would always be insecure, and often erroneous. Thus the term papilionaceous applied to a flower is employed to indicate, not only a resemblance to a butterfly, but a resemblance arising from five petals of a certain peculiar shape and arrangement; and even if the resemblance were much stronger than it is in such cases, yet, if it were produced in a different way, as for example, by one petal, or two only, instead of a 'standard,' two 'wings,' and a 'keel' consisting of two parts more or less united into one, we should be no longer justified in speaking of it as a 'papilionaceous' flower."
When, however, the thing named is, as in this last case, a combination of simple sensations, it is not necessary, in order to learn the meaning of the word, that the student should refer back to the sensations themselves; it may be communicated to him through the medium of other words; the terms, in short, may be defined. But the names of elementary sensations, or elementary feelings of any sort, cannot be defined; nor is there any mode of making their signification known but by making the learner experience the sensation, or referring him, through some known mark, to his remembrance of having experienced it before. Hence it is only the impressions on the outward senses, or those inward feelings which are connected in a very obvious and uniform manner with outward objects, that are really susceptible of an exact descriptive language. The countless variety of sensations which arise, for instance, from disease, or from peculiar physiological states, it would be in vain to attempt to name; for as no one can judge whether the sensation I have is the same with his, the name cannot have, to us two, real community of meaning. The same may be said, to a considerable extent, of purely mental feelings. But in some of the sciences which are conversant with external objects, it is scarcely possible to surpass the perfection to which this quality of a philosophical language has been carried.
"The formation[18] of an exact and extensive descriptive language for botany has been executed with a degree of skill and felicity, which, before it was attained, could hardly have been dreamt of as attainable. Every part of a plant has been named; and the form of every part, even the most minute, has had a large assemblage of descriptive terms appropriated to it, by means of which the botanist can convey and receive knowledge of form and structure, as exactly as if each minute part were presented to him vastly magnified. This acquisition was part of the Linnæan reform.... 'Tournefort,' says Decandolle, 'appears to have been the first who really perceived the utility of fixing the sense of terms in such a way as always to employ the same word in the same sense, and always to express the same idea by the same words; but it was Linnæus who really created and fixed this botanical language, and this is his fairest claim to glory, for by this fixation of language he has shed clearness and precision over all parts of the science.'
"It is not necessary here to give any detailed account of the terms of botany. The fundamental ones have been gradually introduced, as the parts of plants were more carefully and minutely examined. Thus the flower was necessarily distinguished into the calyx, the corolla, the stamens, and the pistils; the sections of the corolla were termed petals by Columna; those of the calyx were called sepals by Necker. Sometimes terms of greater generality were devised; as perianth, to include the calyx and corolla, whether one or both of these were present; pericarp, for the part enclosing the grain, of whatever kind it be, fruit, nut, pod, &c. And it may easily be imagined, that descriptive terms may, by definition and combination, become very numerous and distinct. Thus leaves may be called pinnatifid, pinnatipartite, pinnatisect, pinnatilobate, palmatifid, palmatipartite, &c., and each of these words designates different combinations of the modes and extent of the divisions of the leaf with the divisions of its outline. In some cases, arbitrary numerical relations are introduced into the definition: thus, a leaf is called bilobate, when it is divided into two parts by a notch; but if the notch go to the middle of its length, it is bifid; if it go near the base of the leaf, it is bipartite; if to the base, it is bisect. Thus, too, a pod of a cruciferous plant is a siliqua, if it is four times as long as it is broad, but if it be shorter than this it is a silicula. Such terms being established, the form of the very complex leaf or frond of a fern (Hymenophyllum Wilsoni) is exactly conveyed by the following phrase:—'fronds rigid pinnate, pinnæ recurved subunilateral, pinnatifid, the segments linear undivided or bifid spinuloso-serrate.'
"Other characters, as well as form, are conveyed with the like precision: Colour by means of a classified scale of colours.... This was done with most precision by Werner, and his scale of colours is still the most usual standard of naturalists. Werner also introduced a more exact terminology with regard to other characters which are important in mineralogy, as lustre, hardness. But Mohs improved upon this step by giving a numerical scale of hardness, in which talc is 1, gypsum 2, calc spar 3, and so on.... Some properties, as specific gravity, by their definition give at once a numerical measure; and others, as crystalline form, require a very considerable array of mathematical calculation and reasoning, to point out their relations and gradations."
§ 3. Thus far of Descriptive Terminology, or of the language requisite for placing on record our observation of individual instances. But when we proceed from this to Induction, or rather to that comparison of observed instances which is the preparatory step towards it, we stand in need of an additional and a different sort of general names.
Whenever, for purposes of Induction, we find it necessary to introduce (in Dr. Whewell's phraseology) some new general conception; that is, whenever the comparison of a set of phenomena leads to the recognition in them of some common circumstance, which, our attention not having been directed to it on any former occasion, is to us a new phenomenon; it is of importance that this new conception, or this new result of abstraction, should have a name appropriated to it; especially if the circumstance it involves be one which leads to many consequences, or which is likely to be found also in other classes of phenomena. No doubt, in most cases of the kind, the meaning might be conveyed by joining together several words already in use. But when a thing has to be often spoken of, there are more reasons than the saving of time and space, for speaking of it in the most concise manner possible. What darkness would be spread over geometrical demonstrations, if wherever the word circle is used, the definition of a circle were inserted instead of it. In mathematics and its applications, where the nature of the processes demands that the attention should be strongly concentrated, but does not require that it should be widely diffused, the importance of concentration also in the expressions has always been duly felt; and a mathematician no sooner finds that he shall often have occasion to speak of the same two things together, than he at once creates a term to express them whenever combined: just as, in his algebraical operations, he substitutes for (am + bn) p/q, or for a/b + b/c + c/d + &c., the single letter P, Q, or S; not solely to shorten his symbolical expressions, but to simplify the purely intellectual part of his operations, by enabling the mind to give its exclusive attention to the relation between the quantity S and the other quantities which enter into the equation, without being distracted by thinking unnecessarily of the parts of which S is itself composed.
But there is another reason, in addition to that of promoting perspicuity, for giving a brief and compact name to each of the more considerable results of abstraction which are obtained in the course of our intellectual phenomena. By naming them, we fix our attention upon them; we keep them more constantly before the mind. The names are remembered, and being remembered, suggest their definition; while if instead of specific and characteristic names, the meaning had been expressed by putting together a number of other names, that particular combination of words already in common use for other purposes would have had nothing to make itself remembered by. If we want to render a particular combination of ideas permanent in the mind, there is nothing which clenches it like a name specially devoted to express it. If mathematicians had been obliged to speak of "that to which a quantity, in increasing or diminishing, is always approaching nearer, so that the difference becomes less than any assignable quantity, but to which it never becomes exactly equal," instead of expressing all this by the simple phrase, "the limit of a quantity," we should probably have long remained without most of the important truths which have been discovered by means of the relation between quantities of various kinds and their limits. If instead of speaking of momentum, it had been necessary to say, "the product of the number of units of velocity in the velocity by the number of units of mass in the mass," many of the dynamical truths now apprehended by means of this complex idea would probably have escaped notice, for want of recalling the idea itself with sufficient readiness and familiarity. And on subjects less remote from the topics of popular discussion, whoever wishes to draw attention to some new or unfamiliar distinction among things, will find no way so sure as to invent or select suitable names for the express purpose of marking it.
A volume devoted to explaining what the writer means by civilization, does not raise so vivid a conception of it as the single expression, that Civilization is a different thing from Cultivation; the compactness of that brief designation for the contrasted quality being an equivalent for a long discussion. So, if we would impress forcibly upon the understanding and memory the distinction between the two different conceptions of a representative government, we cannot more effectually do so than by saying that Delegation is not Representation. Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly-selected words or phrases have, as it were, nailed them down and held them fast.
§ 4. Of the three essential parts of a philosophical language, we have now mentioned two: a terminology suited for describing with precision the individual facts observed; and a name for every common property of any importance or interest, which we detect by comparing those facts: including (as the concretes corresponding to those abstract terms) names for the classes which we artificially construct in virtue of those properties, or as many of them, at least, as we have frequent occasion to predicate anything of.
But there is a sort of classes, for the recognition of which no such elaborate process is necessary; because each of them is marked out from all others not by some one property, the detection of which may depend on a difficult act of abstraction, but by its properties generally. I mean, the Kinds of things, in the sense which, in this treatise, has been specially attached to that term. By a Kind, it will be remembered, we mean one of those classes which are distinguished from all others not by one or a few definite properties, but by an unknown multitude of them: the combination of properties on which the class is grounded, being a mere index to an indefinite number of other distinctive attributes. The class horse is a Kind, because the things which agree in possessing the characters by which we recognise a horse, agree in a great number of other properties, as we know, and, it cannot be doubted, in many more than we know. Animal, again, is a Kind, because no definition that could be given of the name animal could either exhaust the properties common to all animals, or supply premises from which the remainder of those properties could be inferred. But a combination of properties which does not give evidence of the existence of any other independent peculiarities, does not constitute a Kind. White horse, therefore, is not a Kind; because horses which agree in whiteness, do not agree in anything else, except the qualities common to all horses, and whatever may be the causes or effects of that particular colour.
On the principle that there should be a name for everything which we have frequent occasion to make assertions about, there ought evidently to be a name for every Kind; for as it is the very meaning of a Kind that the individuals composing it have an indefinite multitude of properties in common, it follows that, if not with our present knowledge, yet with that which we may hereafter acquire, the Kind is a subject to which there will have to be applied many predicates. The third component element of a philosophical language, therefore, is that there shall be a name for every Kind. In other words, there must not only be a terminology, but also a nomenclature.
The words Nomenclature and Terminology are employed by most authors almost indiscriminately; Dr. Whewell being, as far as I am aware, the first writer who has regularly assigned to the two words different meanings. The distinction however which he has drawn between them being real and important, his example is likely to be followed; and (as is apt to be the case when such innovations in language are felicitously made) a vague sense of the distinction is found to have influenced the employment of the terms in common practice, before the expediency had been pointed out of discriminating them philosophically. Every one would say that the reform effected by Lavoisier and Guyton-Morveau in the language of chemistry consisted in the introduction of a new nomenclature, not of a new terminology. Linear, lanceolate, oval, or oblong, serrated, dentate, or crenate leaves, are expressions forming part of the terminology of botany, while the names "Viola odorata," and "Ulex Europæus," belong to its nomenclature.
A nomenclature may be defined, the collection of the names of all the Kinds with which any branch of knowledge is conversant; or more properly, of all the lowest Kinds, or infimæ species—those which may be subdivided indeed, but not into Kinds, and which generally accord with what in natural history are termed simply species. Science possesses two splendid examples of a systematic nomenclature; that of plants and animals, constructed by Linnæus and his successors, and that of chemistry, which we owe to the illustrious group of chemists who flourished in France towards the close of the eighteenth century. In these two departments, not only has every known species, or lowest Kind, a name assigned to it, but when new lowest Kinds are discovered, names are at once given to them on an uniform principle. In other sciences the nomenclature is not at present constructed on any system, either because the species to be named are not numerous enough to require one, (as in geometry for example,) or because no one has yet suggested a suitable principle for such a system, as in mineralogy; in which the want of a scientifically constructed nomenclature is now the principal cause which retards the progress of the science.
§ 5. A word which carries on its face that it belongs to a nomenclature, seems at first sight to differ from other concrete general names in this—that its meaning does not reside in its connotation, in the attributes implied in it, but in its denotation, that is, in the particular group of things which it is appointed to designate; and cannot, therefore, be unfolded by means of a definition, but must be made known in another way. This opinion, however, appears to me erroneous. Words belonging to a nomenclature differ, I conceive, from other words mainly in this, that besides the ordinary connotation, they have a peculiar one of their own: besides connoting certain attributes, they also connote that those attributes are distinctive of a Kind. The term "peroxide of iron," for example, belonging by its form to the systematic nomenclature of chemistry, bears on its face that it is the name of a peculiar Kind of substance. It moreover connotes, like the name of any other class, some portion of the properties common to the class; in this instance the property of being a compound of iron and the largest dose of oxygen with which iron will combine. These two things, the fact of being such a compound, and the fact of being a Kind, constitute the connotation of the name peroxide of iron. When we say of the substance before us, that it is the peroxide of iron, we thereby assert, first, that it is a compound of iron and a maximum of oxygen, and next, that the substance so composed is a peculiar Kind of substance.
Now, this second part of the connotation of any word belonging to a nomenclature is as essential a portion of its meaning as the first part, while the definition only declares the first: and hence the appearance that the signification of such terms cannot be conveyed by a definition: which appearance, however, is fallacious. The name Viola odorata denotes a Kind, of which a certain number of characters, sufficient to distinguish it, are enunciated in botanical works. This enumeration of characters is surely, as in other cases, a definition of the name. No, say some, it is not a definition, for the name Viola odorata does not mean those characters; it means that particular group of plants, and the characters are selected from among a much greater number, merely as marks by which to recognise the group. But to this I reply, that the name does not mean that group, for it would be applied to that group no longer than while the group is believed to be an infima species; if it were to be discovered that several distinct Kinds have been confounded under this one name, no one would any longer apply the name Viola odorata to the whole of the group, but would apply it, if retained at all, to one only of the Kinds contained therein. What is imperative, therefore, is not that the name shall denote one particular collection of objects, but that it shall denote a Kind, and a lowest Kind. The form of the name declares that, happen what will, it is to denote an infima species; and that, therefore, the properties which it connotes, and which are expressed in the definition, are to be connoted by it no longer than while we continue to believe that those properties, when found together, indicate a Kind, and that the whole of them are found in no more than one Kind.
With the addition of this peculiar connotation, implied in the form of every word which belongs to a systematic nomenclature; the set of characters which is employed to discriminate each Kind from all other Kinds (and which is a real definition) constitutes as completely as in any other case the whole meaning of the term. It is no objection to say that (as is often the case in natural history) the set of characters may be changed, and another substituted as being better suited for the purpose of distinction, while the word, still continuing to denote the same group of things, is not considered to have changed its meaning. For this is no more than may happen in the case of any other general name: we may, in reforming its connotation, leave its denotation untouched; and it is generally desirable to do so. The connotation, however, is not the less for this the real meaning, for we at once apply the name wherever the characters set down in the definition are found; and that which exclusively guides us in applying the term, must constitute its signification. If we find, contrary to our previous belief, that the characters are not peculiar to one species, we cease to use the term coextensively with the characters; but then it is because the other portion of the connotation fails; the condition that the class must be a Kind. The connotation, therefore, is still the meaning; the set of descriptive characters is a true definition; and the meaning is unfolded, not indeed (as in other cases) by the definition alone, but by the definition and the form of the word taken together.
§ 6. We have now analysed what is implied in the two principal requisites of a philosophical language; first, precision, or definiteness, and secondly, completeness. Any further remarks on the mode of constructing a nomenclature must be deferred until we treat of Classification; the mode of naming the Kinds of things being necessarily subordinate to the mode of arranging those Kinds into larger classes. With respect to the minor requisites of terminology, some of them are well stated and illustrated in the "Aphorisms concerning the Language of Science," included in Dr. Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. These, as being of secondary importance in the peculiar point of view of Logic, I shall not further refer to, but shall confine my observations to one more quality, which, next to the two already treated of, appears to be the most valuable which the language of science can possess. Of this quality a general notion may be conveyed by the following aphorism:
Whenever the nature of the subject permits our reasoning processes to be, without danger, carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in the contrary case, it should be so constructed that there shall be the greatest possible obstacles to a merely mechanical use of it.
I am aware that this maxim requires much explanation, which I shall at once proceed to give. And first, as to what is meant by using a language mechanically. The complete or extreme case of the mechanical use of language, is when it is used without any consciousness of a meaning, and with only the consciousness of using certain visible or audible marks in conformity to technical rules previously laid down. This extreme case is nowhere realized except in the figures of arithmetic and the symbols of algebra, a language unique in its kind, and approaching as nearly to perfection, for the purposes to which it is destined, as can, perhaps, be said of any creation of the human mind. Its perfection consists in the completeness of its adaptation to a purely mechanical use. The symbols are mere counters, without even the semblance of a meaning apart from the convention which is renewed each time they are employed, and which is altered at each renewal, the same symbol a or x being used on different occasions to represent things which (except that, like all things, they are susceptible of being numbered) have no property in common. There is nothing, therefore, to distract the mind from the set of mechanical operations which are to be performed upon the symbols, such as squaring both sides of the equation, multiplying or dividing them by the same or by equivalent symbols, and so forth. Each of these operations, it is true, corresponds to a syllogism; represents one step of a ratiocination relating not to the symbols, but to the things signified by them. But as it has been found practicable to frame a technical form, by conforming to which we can make sure of finding the conclusion of the ratiocination, our end can be completely attained without our ever thinking of anything but the symbols. Being thus intended to work merely as mechanism, they have the qualities which mechanism ought to have. They are of the least possible bulk, so that they take up scarcely any room, and waste no time in their manipulation; they are compact, and fit so closely together that the eye can take in the whole at once of almost every operation which they are employed to perform.
These admirable properties of the symbolical language of mathematics have made so strong an impression on the minds of many thinkers, as to have led them to consider the symbolical language in question as the ideal type of philosophical language generally; to think that names in general, or (as they are fond of calling them) signs, are fitted for the purposes of thought in proportion as they can be made to approximate to the compactness, the entire unmeaningness, and the capability of being used as counters without a thought of what they represent, which are characteristic of the a and b, the x and y, of algebra. This notion has led to sanguine views of the acceleration of the progress of science by means which, I conceive, cannot possibly conduce to that end, and forms part of that exaggerated estimate of the influence of signs, which has contributed in no small degree to prevent the real laws of our intellectual operations from being rightly understood.
In the first place, a set of signs by which we reason without consciousness of their meaning, can be serviceable, at most, only in our deductive operations. In our direct inductions we cannot for a moment dispense with a distinct mental image of the phenomena, since the whole operation turns on a perception of the particulars in which those phenomena agree and differ. But, further, this reasoning by counters is only suitable to a very limited portion even of our deductive processes. In our reasonings respecting numbers, the only general principles which we ever have occasion to introduce, are these, Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another, and The sums or differences of equal things are equal, with their various corollaries. Not only can no hesitation ever arise respecting the applicability of these principles, since they are true of all magnitudes whatever; but every possible application of which they are susceptible, may be reduced to a technical rule; and such, in fact, the rules of the calculus are. But if the symbols represent any other things than mere numbers, let us say even straight or curve lines, we have then to apply theorems of geometry not true of all lines without exception, and to select those which are true of the lines we are reasoning about. And how can we do this unless we keep completely in mind what particular lines these are? Since additional geometrical truths may be introduced into the ratiocination in any stage of its progress, we cannot suffer ourselves, during even the smallest part of it, to use the names mechanically (as we use algebraical symbols) without an image annexed to them. It is only after ascertaining that the solution of a question concerning lines can be made to depend on a previous question concerning numbers, or in other words after the question has been (to speak technically) reduced to an equation, that the unmeaning signs become available, and that the nature of the facts themselves to which the investigation relates can be dismissed from the mind. Up to the establishment of the equation, the language in which mathematicians carry on their reasoning does not differ in character from that employed by close reasoners on any other kind of subject.
I do not deny that every correct ratiocination, when thrown into the syllogistic shape, is conclusive from the mere form of the expression, provided none of the terms used be ambiguous; and this is one of the circumstances which have led some writers to think that if all names were so judiciously constructed and so carefully defined as not to admit of any ambiguity, the improvement thus made in language would not only give to the conclusions of every deductive science the same certainty with those of mathematics, but would reduce all reasonings to the application of a technical form, and enable their conclusiveness to be rationally assented to after a merely mechanical process, as is undoubtedly the case in algebra. But, if we except geometry, the conclusions of which are already as certain and exact as they can be made, there is no science but that of number, in which the practical validity of a reasoning can be apparent to any person who has looked only at the form of the process. Whoever has assented to what was said in the last Book concerning the case of the Composition of Causes, and the still stronger case of the entire supersession of one set of laws by another, is aware that geometry and algebra are the only sciences of which the propositions are categorically true: the general propositions of all other sciences are true only hypothetically, supposing that no counteracting cause happens to interfere. A conclusion, therefore, however correctly deduced, in point of form, from admitted laws of nature, will have no other than an hypothetical certainty. At every step we must assure ourselves that no other law of nature has superseded, or intermingled its operation with, those which are the premises of the reasoning; and how can this be done by merely looking at the words? We must not only be constantly thinking of the phenomena themselves, but we must be constantly studying them; making ourselves acquainted with the peculiarities of every case to which we attempt to apply our general principles.
The algebraic notation, considered as a philosophical language, is perfect in its adaptation to the subjects for which it is commonly employed, namely those of which the investigations have already been reduced to the ascertainment of a relation between numbers. But, admirable as it is for its own purpose, the properties by which it is rendered such are so far from constituting it the ideal model of philosophical language in general, that the more nearly the language of any other branch of science approaches to it, the less fit that language is for its own proper functions. On all other subjects, instead of contrivances to prevent our attention from being distracted by thinking of the meaning of our signs, we ought to wish for contrivances to make it impossible that we should ever lose sight of that meaning even for an instant.
With this view, as much meaning as possible should be thrown into the formation of the word itself; the aids of derivation and analogy being made available to keep alive a consciousness of all that is signified by it. In this respect those languages have an immense advantage which form their compounds and derivatives from native roots, like the German, and not from those of a foreign or dead language, as is so much the case with English, French, and Italian: and the best are those which form them according to fixed analogies, corresponding to the relations between the ideas to be expressed. All languages do this more or less, but especially, among modern European languages, the German; while even that is inferior to the Greek, in which the relation between the meaning of a derivative word and that of its primitive is in general clearly marked by its mode of formation; except in the case of words compounded with prepositions, which are often, in both those languages, extremely anomalous.
But all that can be done, by the mode of constructing words, to prevent them from degenerating into sounds passing through the mind without any distinct apprehension of what they signify, is far too little for the necessity of the case. Words, however well constructed originally, are always tending, like coins, to have their inscription worn off by passing from hand to hand; and the only possible mode of reviving it is to be ever stamping it afresh, by living in the habitual contemplation of the phenomena themselves, and not resting in our familiarity with the words that express them. If any one, having possessed himself of the laws of phenomena as recorded in words, whether delivered to him originally by others, or even found out by himself, is content from thenceforth to live among these formulæ, to think exclusively of them, and of applying them to cases as they arise, without keeping up his acquaintance with the realities from which these laws were collected—not only will he continually fail in his practical efforts, because he will apply his formulæ without duly considering whether, in this case and in that, other laws of nature do not modify or supersede them; but the formulæ themselves will progressively lose their meaning to him, and he will cease at last even to be capable of recognising with certainty whether a case falls within the contemplation of his formula or not. It is, in short, as necessary, on all subjects not mathematical, that the things on which we reason should be conceived by us in the concrete, and "clothed in circumstances," as it is in algebra that we should keep all individualizing peculiarities sedulously out of view.
With this remark we close our observations on the Philosophy of Language.
CHAPTER VII.
OF CLASSIFICATION, AS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION.
§ 1. There is, as has been frequently remarked in this work, a classification of things, which is inseparable from the fact of giving them general names. Every name which connotes an attribute, divides, by that very fact, all things whatever into two classes, those which have the attribute and those which have it not; those of which the name can be predicated, and those of which it cannot. And the division thus made is not merely a division of such things as actually exist, or are known to exist, but of all such as may hereafter be discovered, and even of all which can be imagined.
On this kind of Classification we have nothing to add to what has previously been said. The Classification which requires to be discussed as a separate act of the mind, is altogether different. In the one, the arrangement of objects in groups, and distribution of them into compartments, is a mere incidental effect consequent on the use of names given for another purpose, namely that of simply expressing some of their qualities. In the other the arrangement and distribution are the main object, and the naming is secondary to, and purposely conforms itself to, instead of governing, that more important operation.
Classification, thus regarded, is a contrivance for the best possible ordering of the ideas of objects in our minds; for causing the ideas to accompany or succeed one another in such a way as shall give us the greatest command over our knowledge already acquired, and lead most directly to the acquisition of more. The general problem of Classification, in reference to these purposes, may be stated as follows: To provide that things shall be thought of in such groups, and those groups in such an order, as will best conduce to the remembrance and to the ascertainment of their laws.
Classification thus considered, differs from classification in the wider sense, in having reference to real objects exclusively, and not to all that are imaginable: its object being the due co-ordination in our minds of those things only, with the properties of which we have actually occasion to make ourselves acquainted. But, on the other hand, it embraces all really existing objects. We cannot constitute any one class properly, except in reference to a general division of the whole of nature; we cannot determine the group in which any one object can most conveniently be placed, without taking into consideration all the varieties of existing objects, all at least which have any degree of affinity with it. No one family of plants or animals could have been rationally constituted, except as part of a systematic arrangement of all plants or animals; nor could such a general arrangement have been properly made, without first determining the exact place of plants and animals in a general division of nature.
§ 2. There is no property of objects which may not be taken, if we please, as the foundation for a classification or mental grouping of those objects; and in our first attempts we are likely to select for that purpose properties which are simple, easily conceived, and perceptible on a first view, without any previous process of thought. Thus Tournefort's arrangement of plants was founded on the shape and divisions of the corolla; and that which is commonly called the Linnæan (though Linnæus also suggested another and more scientific arrangement) was grounded chiefly on the number of the stamens and pistils.
But these classifications, which are at first recommended by the facility they afford of ascertaining to what class any individual belongs, are seldom much adapted to the ends of that Classification which is the subject of our present remarks. The Linnæan arrangement answers the purpose of making us think together of all those kinds of plants which possess the same number of stamens and pistils; but to think of them in that manner is of little use, since we seldom have anything to affirm in common of the plants which have a given number of stamens and pistils. If plants of the class Pentandria, order Monogynia, agreed in any other properties, the habit of thinking and speaking of the plants under a common designation would conduce to our remembering those common properties so far as they were ascertained, and would dispose us to be on the look-out for such of them as were not yet known. But since this is not the case, the only purpose of thought which the Linnæan classification serves is that of causing us to remember, better than we should otherwise have done, the exact number of stamens and pistils of every species of plants. Now, as this property is of little importance or interest, the remembering it with any particular accuracy is of no moment. And, inasmuch as, by habitually thinking of plants in those groups, we are prevented from habitually thinking of them in groups which have a greater number of properties in common, the effect of such a classification, when systematically adhered to, upon our habits of thought, must be regarded as mischievous.
The ends of scientific classification are best answered, when the objects are formed into groups respecting which a greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important, than could be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be distributed. The properties, therefore, according to which objects are classified, should, if possible, be those which are causes of many other properties: or at any rate, which are sure marks of them. Causes are preferable, both as being the surest and most direct of marks, and as being themselves the properties on which it is of most use that our attention should be strongly fixed. But the property which is the cause of the chief peculiarities of a class, is unfortunately seldom fitted to serve also as the diagnostic of the class. Instead of the cause, we must generally select some of its more prominent effects, which may serve as marks of the other effects and of the cause.
A classification thus formed is properly scientific or philosophical, and is commonly called a Natural, in contradistinction to a Technical or Artificial, classification or arrangement. The phrase Natural Classification seems most peculiarly appropriate to such arrangements as correspond, in the groups which they form, to the spontaneous tendencies of the mind, by placing together the objects most similar in their general aspect: in opposition to those technical systems which, arranging things according to their agreement in some circumstance arbitrarily selected, often throw into the same group objects which in the general aggregate of their properties present no resemblance, and into different and remote groups, others which have the closest similarity. It is one of the most valid recommendations of any classification to the character of a scientific one, that it shall be a natural classification in this sense also; for the test of its scientific character is the number and importance of the properties which can be asserted in common of all objects included in a group; and properties on which the general aspect of the things depends, are, if only on that ground, important, as well as, in most cases, numerous. But, though a strong recommendation, this circumstance is not a sine quâ non; since the most obvious properties of things may be of trifling importance compared with others that are not obvious. I have seen it mentioned as a great absurdity in the Linnæan classification, that it places (which by the way it does not) the violet by the side of the oak: it certainly dissevers natural affinities, and brings together things quite as unlike as the oak and the violet are. But the difference, apparently so wide, which renders the juxtaposition of those two vegetables so suitable an illustration of a bad arrangement, depends, to the common eye, mainly on mere size and texture; now if we made it our study to adopt the classification which would involve the least peril of similar rapprochements, we should return to the obsolete division into trees, shrubs, and herbs, which though of primary importance with regard to more general aspect, yet (compared even with so petty and unobvious a distinction as that into dicotyledons and monocotyledons) answers to so few differences in the other properties of plants, that a classification founded on it (independently of the indistinctness of the lines of demarcation) would be as completely artificial and technical as the Linnæan.
Our natural groups, therefore, must often be founded not on the obvious, but on the unobvious properties of things, when these are of greater importance. But in such cases it is essential that there should be some other property or set of properties, more readily recognisable by the observer, which coexist with, and may be received as marks of, the properties which are the real groundwork of the classification. A natural arrangement, for example, of animals, must be founded in the main on their internal structure, but (as has been justly remarked) it would be absurd that we should not be able to determine the genus and species of an animal without first killing it. On this ground, the preference, among zoological classifications, is probably due to that of M. de Blainville, founded on the differences in the external integuments; differences which correspond, much more accurately than might be supposed, to the really important varieties, both in the other parts of the structure, and in the habits and history of the animals.
This shows, more strongly than ever, how extensive a knowledge of the properties of objects is necessary for making a good classification of them. And as it is one of the uses of such a classification that by drawing attention to the properties on which it is founded, and which if the classification be good are marks of many others, it facilitates the discovery of those others; we see in what manner our knowledge of things, and our classification of them, tend mutually and indefinitely to the improvement of each other.
We said just now that the classification of objects should follow those of their properties which indicate not only the most numerous, but also the most important peculiarities. What is here meant by importance? It has reference to the particular end in view; and the same objects, therefore, may admit with propriety of several different classifications. Each science or art forms its classification of things according to the properties which fall within its special cognizance, or of which it must take account in order to accomplish its peculiar practical end. A farmer does not divide plants, like a botanist, into dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous, but into useful plants and weeds. A geologist divides fossils, not like a zoologist, into families corresponding to those of living species, but into fossils of the secondary and of the tertiary periods, above the coal and below the coal, &c. Whales are or are not fish, according to the purpose for which we are considering them. "If we are speaking of the internal structure and physiology of the animal, we must not call them fish; for in these respects they deviate widely from fishes: they have warm blood, and produce and suckle their young as land quadrupeds do. But this would not prevent our speaking of the whale fishery, and calling such animals fish on all occasions connected with this employment; for the relations thus rising depend upon the animal's living in the water, and being caught in a manner similar to other fishes. A plea that human laws which mention fish do not apply to whales, would be rejected at once by an intelligent judge."[19]
These different classifications are all good, for the purposes of their own particular departments of knowledge or practice. But when we are studying objects not for any special practical end, but for the sake of extending our knowledge of the whole of their properties and relations, we must consider as the most important attributes, those which contribute most, either by themselves or by their effects, to render the things like one another, and unlike other things; which give to the class composed of them the most marked individuality; which fill, as it were, the largest space in their existence, and would most impress the attention of a spectator who knew all their properties but was not specially interested in any. Classes formed on this principle may be called, in a more emphatic manner than any others, natural groups.
§ 3. On the subject of these groups Dr. Whewell lays down a theory, grounded on an important truth, which he has, in some respects, expressed and illustrated very felicitously; but also, as it appears to me, with some admixture of error. It will be advantageous, for both these reasons, to extract the statement of his doctrine in the very words he has used.
"Natural groups," according to this theory,[20] are "given by Type, not by Definition." And this consideration accounts for that "indefiniteness and indecision which we frequently find in the descriptions of such groups, and which must appear so strange and inconsistent to any one who does not suppose these descriptions to assume any deeper ground of connexion than an arbitrary choice of the botanist. Thus in the family of the rose-tree, we are told that the ovules are very rarely erect, the stigmata usually simple. Of what use, it might be asked, can such loose accounts be? To which the answer is, that they are not inserted in order to distinguish the species, but in order to describe the family, and the total relations of the ovules and the stigmata of the family are better known by this general statement. A similar observation may be made with regard to the Anomalies of each group, which occur so commonly, that Mr. Lindley, in his Introduction to the Natural System of Botany, makes the 'Anomalies' an article in each family. Thus, part of the character of the Rosaceæ is, that they have alternate stipulate leaves, and that the albumen is obliterated; but yet in Lowea, one of the genera of this family, the stipulæ are absent; and the albumen is present in another, Neillia. This implies, as we have already seen, that the artificial character (or diagnosis, as Mr. Lindley calls it,) is imperfect. It is, though very nearly, yet not exactly, commensurate with the natural group: and hence in certain cases this character is made to yield to the general weight of natural affinities.
"These views,—of classes determined by characters which cannot be expressed in words,—of propositions which state, not what happens in all cases, but only usually,—of particulars which are included in a class, though they transgress the definition of it, may probably surprise the reader. They are so contrary to many of the received opinions respecting the use of definitions, and the nature of scientific propositions, that they will probably appear to many persons highly illogical and unphilosophical. But a disposition to such a judgment arises in a great measure from this, that the mathematical and mathematico-physical sciences have, in a great degree, determined men's views of the general nature and form of scientific truth; while Natural History has not yet had time or opportunity to exert its due influence upon the current habits of philosophizing. The apparent indefiniteness and inconsistency of the classifications and definitions of Natural History belongs, in a far higher degree, to all other except mathematical speculations; and the modes in which approximations to exact distinctions and general truths have been made in Natural History, may be worthy our attention, even for the light they throw upon the best modes of pursuing truth of all kinds.
"Though in a Natural group of objects a definition can no longer be of any use as a regulative principle, classes are not therefore left quite loose, without any certain standard or guide. The class is steadily fixed, though not precisely limited; it is given, though not circumscribed; it is determined, not by a boundary line without, but by a central point within; not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes; by an example, not by a precept; in short, instead of a Definition we have a Type for our director.
"A Type is an example of any class, for instance a species of a genus, which is considered as eminently possessing the character of the class. All the species which have a greater affinity with this type-species than with any others, form the genus, and are arranged about it, deviating from it in various directions and different degrees. Thus a genus may consist of several species which approach very near the type, and of which the claim to a place with it is obvious; while there may be other species which straggle further from this central knot, and which yet are clearly more connected with it than with any other. And even if there should be some species of which the place is dubious, and which appear to be equally bound to two generic types, it is easily seen that this would not destroy the reality of the generic groups, any more than the scattered trees of the intervening plain prevent our speaking intelligibly of the distinct forests of two separate hills.
"The type-species of every genus, the type-genus of every family, is, then, one which possesses all the characters and properties of the genus in a marked and prominent manner. The type of the Rose family has alternate stipulate leaves, wants the albumen, has the ovules not erect, has the stigmata simple, and besides these features, which distinguish it from the exceptions or varieties of its class, it has the features which make it prominent in its class. It is one of those which possess clearly several leading attributes; and thus, though we cannot say of any one genus that it must be the type of the family, or of any one species that it must be the type of the genus, we are still not wholly to seek; the type must be connected by many affinities with most of the others of its group; it must be near the centre of the crowd, and not one of the stragglers."
In this passage (the latter part of which especially I cannot help noticing as an admirable example of philosophic style) Dr. Whewell has stated very clearly and forcibly, but (I think) without making all necessary distinctions, one of the principles of a Natural Classification. What this principle is, what are its limits, and in what manner he seems to me to have overstepped them, will appear when we have laid down another rule of Natural Arrangement, which appears to me still more fundamental.
§ 4. The reader is by this time familiar with the general truth (which I restate so often on account of the great confusion in which it is commonly involved), that there are in nature distinctions of Kind; distinctions not consisting in a given number of definite properties, plus the effects which follow from those properties, but running through the whole nature, through the attributes generally, of the things so distinguished. Our knowledge of the properties of a Kind is never complete. We are always discovering, and expecting to discover, new ones. Where the distinction between two classes of things is not one of Kind, we expect to find their properties alike, except where there is some reason for their being different. On the contrary, when the distinction is in Kind, we expect to find the properties different unless there be some cause for their being the same. All knowledge of a Kind must be obtained by observation and experiment upon the Kind itself; no inference respecting its properties from the properties of things not connected with it by Kind, goes for more than the sort of presumption usually characterized as an analogy, and generally in one of its fainter degrees.
Since the common properties of a true Kind, and consequently the general assertions which can be made respecting it, or which are certain to be made hereafter as our knowledge extends, are indefinite and inexhaustible; and since the very first principle of natural classification is that of forming the classes so that the objects composing each may have the greatest number of properties in common; this principle prescribes that every such classification shall recognise and adopt into itself all distinctions of Kind, which exist among the objects it professes to classify. To pass over any distinctions of Kind, and substitute definite distinctions, which, however considerable they may be, do not point to ulterior unknown differences, would be to replace classes with more by classes with fewer attributes in common; and would be subversive of the Natural Method of Classification.
Accordingly all natural arrangements, whether the reality of the distinction of Kinds was felt or not by their framers, have been led, by the mere pursuit of their own proper end, to conform themselves to the distinctions of Kind, so far as these had been ascertained at the time. The Species of Plants are not only real Kinds, but are probably,[21] all of them, real lowest Kinds, Infimæ Species; which if we were to subdivide, as of course it is open to us to do, into subclasses, the subdivision would necessarily be founded on definite distinctions, not pointing (apart from what may be known of their causes or effects) to any difference beyond themselves.
[15] Such cases give a clear insight into the process of the degeneration of languages in periods of history when literary culture was suspended; and we are now in danger of experiencing a similar evil through the superficial extension of the same culture. So many persons without anything deserving the name of education have become writers by profession, that written language may almost be said to be principally wielded by persons ignorant of the proper use of the instrument, and who are spoiling it more and more for those who understand it. Vulgarisms, which creep in nobody knows how, are daily depriving the English language of valuable modes of expressing thought. To take a present instance: the verb transpire formerly conveyed very expressively its correct meaning, viz. to become known through unnoticed channels—to exhale, as it were, into publicity through invisible pores, like a vapour or gas disengaging itself. But of late a practice has commenced of employing this word, for the sake of finery, as a mere synonym of to happen: "the events which have transpired in the Crimea," meaning the incidents of the war. This vile specimen of bad English is already seen in the despatches of noblemen and viceroys: and the time is apparently not far distant when nobody will understand the word if used in its proper sense. It is a great error to think that these corruptions of language do no harm. Those who are struggling with the difficulty (and who know by experience how great it already is) of expressing oneself clearly with precision, find their resources continually narrowed by illiterate writers, who seize and twist from its purpose some form of speech which once served to convey briefly and compactly an unambiguous meaning. It would hardly be believed how often a writer is compelled to a circumlocution by the single vulgarism, introduced during the last few years, of using the word alone as an adverb, only not being fine enough for the rhetoric of ambitious ignorance. A man will say "to which I am not alone bound by honour but also by law," unaware that what he has unintentionally said is, that he is not alone bound, some other person being bound with him. Formerly if any one said, "I am not alone responsible for this," he was understood to mean, (what alone his words mean in correct English,) that he is not the sole person responsible; but if he now used such an expression, the reader would be confused between that and two other meanings; that he is not only responsible but something more; or that he is responsible not only for this but for something besides. The time is coming when Tennyson's Œnone could not say "I will not die alone," lest she should be supposed to mean that she would not only die but do something else.
[18] Hist. Sc. Id. ii. 111-113.
[19] Nov. Org. Renov. pp. 286, 287.
[17] History of Scientific Ideas, ii. 110, 111.
[20] Hist. Sc. Id. ii. 120-122.
[21] I say probably, not certainly, because this is not the consideration by which a botanist determines what shall or shall not be admitted as a species. In natural history those objects belong to the same species, which are, or consistently with experience might have been, produced from the same stock. But this distinction, in most, and probably in all cases, happily accords with the other. It seems to be a law of physiology, that animals and plants do really, in the philosophical as well as the popular sense, propagate their kind; transmitting to their descendants all the distinctions of Kind (down to the most special or lowest Kind) which they themselves possess.
[16] Historical Introduction, vol. i. pp. 66-8.
