One of the most rising thinkers of the new generation in France, M. Taine (who has given, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the most masterly analysis, at least in one point of view, ever made of the present work), though he rejects, on this and similar points of psychology, the intuition theory in its ordinary form, nevertheless assigns to the law of causation, and to some other of the most universal laws, that certainty beyond the bounds of human experience, which I have not been able to accord to them. He does this on the faith of our faculty of abstraction, in which he seems to recognize an independent source of evidence, not indeed disclosing truths not contained in our experience, but affording an assurance which experience can not give, of the universality of those which it does contain. By abstraction M. Taine seems to think that we are able, not merely to analyze that part of nature which we see, and exhibit apart the elements which pervade it, but to distinguish such of them as are elements of the system of nature considered as a whole, not incidents belonging to our limited terrestrial experience. I am not sure that I fully enter into M.
Taine’s meaning; but I confess I do not see how any mere abstract conception, elicited by our minds from our experience, can be evidence of an objective fact in universal Nature, beyond what the experience itself bears witness of; or how, in the process of interpreting in general language the testimony of experience, the limitations of the testimony itself can be cast off. Dr. Ward, in an able article in the Dublin Review for October, 1871, contends that the uniformity of nature can not be proved from experience, but from “transcendental considerations” only, and that, consequently, all physical science would be deprived of its basis, if such transcendental proof were impossible. When physical science is said to depend on the assumption that the course of nature is invariable, all that is meant is that the conclusions of physical science are not known as absolute truths: the truth of them is conditional on the uniformity of the course of nature; and all that the most conclusive observations and experiments can prove, is that the result arrived at will be true if, and as long as, the present laws of nature are valid. But this is all the assurance we require for the guidance of our conduct. Dr.
Ward himself does not think that his transcendental proofs make it practically greater; for he believes, as a Catholic, that the course of nature not only has been, but frequently and even daily is, suspended by supernatural intervention. But though this conditional conclusiveness of the evidence of experience, which is sufficient for the purposes of life, is all that I was necessarily concerned to prove, I have given reasons for thinking that the uniformity, as itself a part of experience, is sufficiently proved to justify undoubting reliance on it. This Dr. Ward contests, for the following reasons: First (p. 315), supposing it true that there has hitherto been no well authenticated case of a breach in the uniformity of nature; “the number of natural agents constantly at work is incalculably large; and the observed cases of uniformity in their action must be immeasurably fewer than one thousandth of the whole. Scientific men, we assume for the moment, have discovered that in a certain proportion of instances—immeasurably fewer than one thousandth of the whole—a certain fact has prevailed; the fact of uniformity; and they have not found a single instance in which that fact does not prevail. Are they justified, we ask, in inferring from these premises that the fact is universal? Surely the question answers itself.