to his senses, or feelings in his internal consciousness, which afforded no warrant for any such belief. A caution, therefore, against this class of errors, is not only needful but indispensable; though to determine whether, on any of the great questions of metaphysics, such errors are actually committed, belongs not to this place, but, as I have so often said, to a different science.
Chapter V.
Fallacies Of Generalization.
§ 1. The class of Fallacies of which we are now to speak, is the most
extensive of all; embracing a greater number and variety of unfounded
inferences than any of the other classes, and which it is even more
difficult to reduce to sub-classes or species. If the attempt made in the
preceding books to define the principles of well-grounded generalization
has been successful, all generalizations not conformable to those
principles might, in a certain sense, be brought under the present class;
when, however, the rules are known and kept in view, but a casual lapse
committed in the application of them, this is a blunder, not a fallacy. To
entitle an error of generalization to the latter epithet, it must be
committed on principle; there must lie in it some erroneous general
conception of the inductive process; the legitimate mode of drawing
conclusions from observation and experiment must be fundamentally
misconceived.
Without attempting any thing so chimerical as an exhaustive classification of all the misconceptions which can exist on the subject, let us content ourselves with noting, among the cautions which might be suggested, a few of the most useful and needful.
§ 2. In the first place, there are certain kinds of generalization which, if the principles already laid down be correct, must be groundless; experience can not afford the necessary conditions for establishing them by a correct induction. Such, for instance, are all inferences from the order of nature existing on the earth, or in the solar system, to that which may exist in remote parts of the universe; where the phenomena, 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.
The only laws of nature which afford sufficient warrant for attributing impossibility (even with reference to the existing order of nature, and to our own region of the universe) are, first, those of number and extension, which are paramount to the laws of the succession of phenomena, and not exposed to the agency of counteracting causes; and, secondly, the
