erences,
have continually been regarded as intuitive judgments.

CHAPTER V.

FALLACIES OF GENERALISATION.

This class includes whatever errors of generalisation are not mere
blunders, but arise from some wrong general conception of the inductive
process. Only a few kinds can be noted. 1. Under this Fallacy come
generalisations which _cannot_ be established by experience, e.g.
inferences from the order in the Solar System to other and unknown parts
of the universe; and also, except when a particular effect would
contradict either the laws of number and extension, or the universal law
of causality, all inferences from the fact that _we_ have never known of
a particular effect to its impossibility. 2. Those generalisations also
are fallacious which resolve, either, as in early Greece, all things
into one element, or, as often in modern times, impressions on the
senses, differing in quality, and not merely in degree, into the same;
e.g. heat, light, and (through vibrations) sensation, into motion;
mental, into nervous states; and vital phenomena, into mechanical or
chemical processes. In these theories, one fact has its laws applied to
another. It may possibly be a condition of that other; but even then the
mode in which the new fact is actually produced would have to be
explained by its own law, and not by that of the condition. 3. Again,
generalisations got by Simple Enumeration, fall under this Fallacy. That
sort of Induction 'precario concludit,' says Bacon, 'et periculo
exponitur ab instantia contradictoria, ... ex his tantummodo quae praesto
sunt pronuncians.' The ancients used it; and in questions relating to
man and society, it is still employed by _practical_ men. By it men
arrived at the various examples of the formula, _Whatsoever has never
been_ (e.g. a State without artificial distinctions of rank; negroes as
civilised as the white race) _will never be_; which, being inductions
without elimination, could at most form the ground only of the lowest
empirical laws. Higher empirical laws can be got, when a phenomenon
presents (as no negation can) a series of regular gradations, since
something may then be inferred from the observed as to the unobservable
terms of the series. Such is the law of man's necessary progression, in
contradiction to the above formula. But even this better generalisation
is similarly, though not as grossly, fallacious as the preceding, when,
though not itself a cause, but only a