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Updated: May 15, 2025
We know that all the life in us and around us follows certain laws, as we call them, the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of man, each following its own laws after its kind, and that is all we know about it. We can observe its action, its uniformities, its sequences, and variations, but beyond this we cannot penetrate its secret. It grows mysteriously, we know not how.
The uniformity of the course of nature is a complex fact made up of all the separate uniformities in respect to single phenomena.
"It becomes conscious of itself as individual and it individualizes the world; it is the one discovering itself among the many. In the midst of uniformities of nature, moving at will on the plane of natural necessities, weaving the pattern of its ideas through the warp of natural laws, runs the personal life.
As soon as we think at all, we speak of white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size, of uniformities in the behaviour of nature, or laws; by such classification of qualities, objects, and various relations, not merely in the sensuous but in every sphere of our consciousness, the mind simplifies its experience, compacts its knowledge, and economizes its energies.
What are the fewest, general propositions from which all the uniformities existing in nature could be deduced? The laws, thus explained or resolved, are sometimes said to be accounted for; but the expression is incorrect, if taken to mean any thing more than what has been already stated.
But there are some uniformities of coexistence, viz. those between the ultimate properties of kinds, which do not depend on causation, and therefore seem entitled to be classed as a peculiar sort of laws of nature.
For, the Order in Place of effects is of course a mere consequence of the laws of their causes; and, as for primæval causes, in their Order in Place, called their collocation, no uniformities are traceable.
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.
The indispensable foundation, therefore, of a scientific formula of induction, must be a survey of the inductions to which mankind have been conducted in unscientific practice; with the special purpose of ascertaining what kinds of uniformities have been found perfectly invariable, pervading all nature, and what are those which have been found to vary with difference of time, place, or other changeable circumstances.
There are, accordingly, no original and independent, in other words no unconditional, uniformities of co-existence, between effects of different causes; if they co-exist, it is only because the causes have casually co-existed.
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