§ 3. But this extension of derivative laws, not causative, beyond the limits of observation, can only be to _adjacent_ cases. If instead of to-morrow we had said this day twenty thousand years, the inductions would have been anything but conclusive. That a cause which, in opposition to very powerful causes, produced no perceptible effect during five thousand years, should produce a very considerable one by the end of twenty thousand, has nothing in it which is not in conformity with our experience of causes. We know many agents, the effect of which in a short period does not amount to a perceptible quantity, but by accumulating for a much longer period becomes considerable. Besides, looking at the immense multitude of the heavenly bodies, their vast distances, and the rapidity of the motion of such of them as are known to move, it is a supposition not at all contradictory to experience that some body may be in motion towards us, or we towards it, within the limits of whose influence we have not come during five thousand years, but which in twenty thousand more may be producing effects upon us of the most extraordinary kind. Or the fact which is capable of preventing sunrise may be, not the cumulative effect of one cause, but some new combination of causes; and the chances favourable to that combination, though they have not produced it once in five thousand years, may produce it once in twenty thousand. So that the inductions which authorize us to expect future events, grow weaker and weaker the further we look into the future, and at length become inappreciable. We have considered the probabilities of the sun's rising to-morrow, as derived from the real laws, that is, from the laws of the causes on which that uniformity is dependent. Let us now consider how the matter would have stood if the uniformity had been known only as an empirical law; if we had not been aware that the sun's light, and the earth's rotation (or the sun's motion), were the causes on which the periodical occurrence of daylight depends. We could have extended this empirical law to cases adjacent in time, though not to so great a distance of time as we can now. Having evidence that the effects had remained unaltered and been punctually conjoined for five thousand years, we could infer that the unknown causes on which the conjunction is dependent had existed undiminished and uncounteracted during the same period. The same conclusions, therefore, would follow as in the preceding case; except that we should only know that during five thousand years nothing had occurred to defeat perceptibly this particular effect; while, when we know the causes, we have the additional assurance, that during that interval no such change has been noticeable in the causes themselves, as by any degree of multiplication or length of continuance could defeat the effect.