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Updated: April 30, 2025
It follows, that neither simple sensation, nor simple emotion, constitutes knowledge; but that, when impressions of relation are added to these impressions, or their ideas, knowledge arises; and that all knowledge is the knowledge of likenesses and unlikenesses, co-existences and successions.
The only independent and unconditional co-existences which are sufficiently invariable to have any claim to the character of laws, are between different and mutually independent effects of the same cause; in other words, between different properties of the same natural agent.
If right reason is a right representation of the co-existence and sequences of things, here are co-existences and sequences that do not wait to be discovered, but press themselves upon us like bars of iron.
4th, and last. The Successions and Co-existences, the Likenesses and Unlikenesses, between feelings or states of consciousness. Those relations, when considered as subsisting between other things, exist in reality only between the states of consciousness which those things, if bodies, excite, if minds, either excite or experience.
After what has been said to illustrate the nature of the inquiry into social phenomena, the general character of the method proper to that inquiry is sufficiently evident, and needs only to be recapitulated, not proved. However complex the phenomena, all their sequences and co-existences result from the laws of the separate elements.
But it is fatal to the universality of the sequences or co-existences of effects, which compose the greater part of the derivative laws flowing from laws of causation.
Only as the multiplication of experiences gives materials for definite conceptions only as observation year by year discloses the less conspicuous attributes which distinguish things and processes previously confounded together only as each class of co-existences and sequences becomes familiar through the recurrence of cases coming under it only as the various classes of relations get accurately marked off from each other by mutual limitation, can the exact definitions of advanced knowledge become truly comprehensible.
Moreover, classification necessarily advances pari passu with rationality the classification of things with the classification of relations. For things that belong to the same class are, by implication, things of which the properties and modes of behaviour the co-existences and sequences are more or less the same; and the recognition of this sameness of co-existences and sequences is reasoning.
In this state, pathology, like all the inductive sciences at their origin, was merely natural history; it registered the phenomena of disease, classified them, and ventured upon a prognosis, wherever the observation of constant co-existences and sequences suggested a rational expectation of the like recurrence under similar circumstances. Further than this it hardly went.
To the slowly growing acquaintance with the uniform co-existences and sequences of phenomena to the establishment of invariable laws, we owe our emancipation from the grossest superstitions. But for science we should be still worshipping fetishes; or, with hecatombs of victims, propitiating diabolical deities.
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