which a is [pg 314] not, B must have been absent as well as A, and it would not be true that these instances agree only in not containing A. This, therefore, constitutes an immense advantage of the joint method over the simple Method of Agreement. It may seem, indeed, that the advantage does not belong so much to the joint method, as to one of its two premises (if they may be so called), the negative premise. The Method of Agreement, when applied to negative instances, or those in which a phenomenon does not take place, is certainly free from the characteristic imperfection which affects it in the affirmative case. The negative premise, it might therefore be supposed, could be worked as a simple case of the Method of Agreement, without requiring an affirmative premise to be joined with it. But though this is true in principle, it is generally altogether impossible to work the Method of Agreement by negative instances without positive ones; it is so much more difficult to exhaust the field of negation than that of affirmation. For instance, let the question be what is the cause of the transparency of bodies; with what prospect of success could we set ourselves to inquire directly in what the multifarious substances which are not transparent agree? But we might hope much sooner to seize some point of resemblance among the comparatively few and definite species of objects which are transparent; and this being attained, we should quite naturally be put upon examining whether the absence of this one circumstance be not precisely the point in which all opaque substances will be found to resemble.
The Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, therefore, or as I have otherwise called it, the Indirect Method of Difference (because, like the Method of Difference properly so-called, it proceeds by ascertaining how and in what the cases where the phenomenon is present differ from those in which it is absent) is, after the Direct Method of Difference, the most powerful of the remaining instruments of inductive investigation; and in the sciences which depend on pure observation, with little or no aid from experiment, this method, so well exemplified in the speculation on the cause of dew, is the primary resource, so far as direct appeals to experience are concerned.