Men cannot help believing that the laws laid down by discoverers must be in a great measure identical with the real laws of nature, when the discoverers thus determine effects beforehand in the same manner in which nature herself determines them when the occasion occurs. Those who can do this, must, to a considerable extent, have detected nature's secret;--must have fixed upon the conditions to which she attends, and must have seized the rules by which she applies them. Such a coincidence of untried facts with speculative assertions cannot be the work of chance, but implies some large portion of truth in the principles on which the reasoning is founded. To trace order and law in that which has been observed, may be considered as interpreting what nature has written down for us, and will commonly prove that we understand her alphabet. But to predict what has not been observed, is to attempt ourselves to use the legislative phrases of nature; and when she responds plainly and precisely to that which we thus utter, we cannot but suppose that we have in a great measure made ourselves masters of the meaning and structure of her language. The prediction of results, even of the same kind as those which have been observed, in new cases, is a proof of real success in our inductive processes. 11. We have here spoken of the prediction of facts _of the same kind_ as those from which our rule was collected. But the evidence in favour of our {88} induction is of a much higher and more forcible character when it enables us to explain and determine cases of a _kind different_ from those which were contemplated in the formation of our hypothesis. The instances in which this has occurred, indeed, impress us with a conviction that the truth of our hypothesis is certain. No accident could give rise to such an extraordinary coincidence. No false supposition could, after being adjusted to one class of phenomena, exactly represent a different class, where the agreement was unforeseen and uncontemplated. That rules springing from remote and unconnected quarters should thus leap to the same point, can only arise from _that_ being the point where truth resides. Accordingly the cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have thus _jumped together_, belong only to the best established theories which the history of science contains. And as I shall have occasion to refer to this peculiar feature in their evidence, I will take the liberty of describing it by a particular phrase; and will term it the _Consilience of Inductions_.