smelled by aid of the same organ, and by the same person? What here renders generalization possible, is the unity of the sentient subject which remembers having been modified, while remaining the same, by different sensations; now, this subject can feel itself identical under different modifications, and it can conceive in the qualities of the object felt some resemblance and some dissimilarity, only on the condition of a certain number of sensations experienced, of odors smelled. In that case, but in that case alone, there can be comparison, abstraction, and generalization, because there are different and similar elements. In order to arrive at the abstract form of universal and necessary principles, we have no need of all this labor. Let us take again, for example, the principle of cause. If you suppose six particular cases from which you have abstracted this principle, it will contain neither more nor less ideas than if you had deduced it from a single one. To be able to say that the event which I see must have a cause, it is not indispensable to have seen several events succeed each other. The principle which compels me to pronounce this judgment, is already complete in the first as in the last event; it can change in respect to its object, it cannot change in itself; it neither increases nor decreases with the greater or less number of its applications. The only difference that it is subject to in regard to us, is, that we apply it whether we remark it or not, whether we disengage it or not from its particular application. The question is not to eliminate the particularity of the phenomenon, wherein it appears to us, whether it be the fall of a leaf or the murder of a man, in order immediately to conceive, in a general and abstract manner, the necessity of a cause for every thing that begins to exist. Here, it is not because I have been the same, or have been affected in the same manner in several different cases, that I have come to this general and abstract conception. A leaf falls: at the same instant I think, I believe, I declare that this falling of the leaf must have a cause. A man has been killed: at the same instant I believe, I proclaim that this death must have a cause. Each one of these facts contains particular and variable circumstances, and something universal and necessary, to wit, both of them cannot but have a cause. Now, I am perfectly able to disengage the universal from the particular, in regard to the first fact as well as in regard to the second fact, for the universal is in the first quite as well as in the second. In fact, if the principle of causality is not universal in the first fact, neither will it be in the second, nor in the third, nor in a thousandth; for a thousand are not nearer than one to the infinite, to absolute universality. It is the same, and still more evidently, with necessity. Pay particular attention to this point: if necessity is not