(201.) As particular inductions and laws of the first degree of generality are obtained from the consideration of individual facts, so Theories result from a consideration of these laws, and of the proximate causes brought into view in the previous process, regarded all together as constituting a new set of phenomena, the creatures of reason rather than of sense, and each representing under general language innumerable particular facts. In raising these higher inductions, therefore, more scope is given to the exercise of pure reason than in slowly groping out our first results. The mind is more disencumbered of matter, and moves as it were in its own element. What is now before it, it perceives more intimately, and less through the medium of sense, or at least not in the same manner as when actually at work on the immediate objects of sense. But it must not be therefore supposed that, in the formation of theories, we are abandoned to the unrestrained exercise of imagination, or at liberty to lay down arbitrary principles, or assume the existence of mere fanciful causes. The liberty of speculation which we possess in the domains of theory is not like the wild licence of the slave broke loose from his fetters, but rather like that of the freeman who has learned the lessons of self-restraint in the school of just subordination. The ultimate objects we pursue in the highest theories are the same as those of the lowest inductions; and the means by which we can most securely attain them bear a close analogy to those which we have found successful in such inferior cases.