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 co-existence 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 co-existence, 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.
§ 4. This conclusion will be confirmed by the consideration of one great deficiency, which precludes the application to the ultimate uniformities of co-existence, 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 co-existence 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 every thing 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 co-exists with it; must have an invariable co-existent, 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 can not 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 disad-
