are those inductions and deductions, and how have you got at this
hypothesis? You have observed, in the first place, that the window
is open; but by a train of reasoning involving many Inductions and
Deductions, you have probably arrived long before at the General
Law--and a very good one it is--that windows do not open of themselves;
and you therefore conclude that something has opened the window. A
second general law that you have arrived at in the same way is, that
tea-pots and spoons do not go out of a window spontaneously, and you are
satisfied that, as they are not now where you left them, they have been
removed. In the third place, you look at the marks on the window-sill,
and the shoemarks outside, and you say that in all previous experience
the former kind of mark has never been produced by anything else but
the hand of a human being; and the same experience shows that no other
animal but man at present wears shoes with hob-nails on them such as
would produce the marks in the gravel. I do not know, even if we could
discover any of those "missing links" that are talked about, that they
would help us to any other conclusion! At any rate the law which states
our present experience is strong enough for my present purpose.--You
next reach the conclusion, that as these kinds of marks have not been
left by any other animals than men, or are liable to be formed in any
other way than by a man's hand and shoe, the marks in question have been
formed by a man in that way. You have, further, a general law, founded
on observation and experience, and that, too, is, I am sorry to say, a
very universal and unimpeachable one,--that some men are thieves;
and you assume at once from all these premisses--and that is what
constitutes your hypothesis--that the man who made the marks outside and
on the window-sill, opened the window, got into the room, and stole your
tea-pot and spoons. You have now arrived at a 'Vera Causa';--you have
assumed a Cause which it is plain is competent to produce all the
phenomena you have observed. You can explain all these phenomena only by
the hypothesis of a thief. But that is a hypothetical conclusion, of the
justice of which you have no absolute proof at all; it is only rendered
highly probable by a series of inductive and deductive reasonings.

I suppose your first action, assuming that you are a man of ordinary
common sense, and that you have established this hypothesis to your own
satisfaction, w