or at least probably will, resemble the phenomenon itself.
Conformably to what we have before remarked to be of frequent occurrence, this fallacy might without much impropriety have been placed in a different class, among Fallacies of Generalization; for experience does afford a certain degree of countenance to the assumption. The cause does, in very many cases, resemble its effect; like produces like. Many phenomena have a direct tendency to perpetuate their own existence, or to give rise to other phenomena similar to themselves. Not to mention forms actually moulded on one another, as impressions on wax and the like, in which the closest resemblance between the effect and its cause is the very law of the phenomenon; all motion tends to continue itself, with its own velocity, and in its own original direction; and the motion of one body tends to set others in motion, which is indeed the most common of the modes in which the motions of bodies originate. We need scarcely refer to contagion, fermentation, and the like; or to the production of effects by the growth or expansion of a germ or rudiment resembling on a smaller scale the completed phenomenon, as in the growth of a plant or animal from an embryo, that embryo itself deriving its origin from another plant or animal of the same kind. Again, the thoughts or reminiscences, which are effects of our past sensations, resemble those sensations; feelings produce similar feelings by way of sympathy; acts produce similar acts by involuntary or voluntary imitation. With so many appearances in its favor, no wonder if a presumption naturally grew up, that causes must necessarily resemble their effects, and that like could only be produced by like.
This principle of fallacy has usually presided over the fantastical attempts to influence the course of nature by conjectural means, the choice of which was not directed by previous observation and experiment. The guess almost always fixed upon some means which possessed features of real or apparent resemblance to the end in view. If a charm was wanted, as by Ovid’s Medea, to prolong life, all long-lived animals, or what were esteemed such, were collected and brewed into a broth: