CHAPTER XI. PHILOSOPHY OF INDUCTIVE INFERENCE.

Inductive inference might attain to certainty if our knowledge of the agents existing throughout the universe were complete, and if we were at the same time certain that the same Power which created the universe would allow it to proceed without arbitrary change. There is always a possibility of causes being in existence without our knowledge, and these may at any moment produce an unexpected effect. Even when by the theory of probabilities we succeed in forming some notion of the comparative confidence with which we should receive inductive results, it yet appears to me that we must make an assumption. Events come out like balls from the vast ballot-box of nature, and close observation will enable us to form some notion, as we shall see in the next chapter, of the contents of that ballot-box. But we must still assume that, between the time of an observation and that to which our inferences relate, no change in the ballot-box has been made.