in all others, which is properly the relation of cause and effect. Our idea of cause and effect is not derived from our immediate but from our _comparative_ experience: it is only by taking our experience to pieces, by seeing what things are, or are not necessarily connected together in different circumstances, that we learn to reason with clearness and confidence on the succession of events. The succession of events is not the same thing as the succession of cause and effect. By assigning a reason for a thing, I mean then being able to refer it to a general rule or principle collected from and proved by an infinite number of collateral instances, and confirming the particular fact or instance to which it is applied. It is drawing together the different ramifications of our experience, and winding them round a particular bundle of things, and tying them fast together. Thus suppose we have never seen a carnation of the size of a cabbage: does it follow that we never shall, or that there can be no such thing? We might say, I know no _reason_ why a flower of a certain shape, colour, &c. should not reach a certain size, but that it has never been so within my knowledge. This might however be owing to the soil, culture, or a thousand circumstances, which are not invariable.—But the moment the reason is given (supposing it to be a good one) namely, the connection between the contexture and weight, (though this reason is also derived indirectly from the general fund of our experience) there is an end at once of the question. To suppose a flower to grow to a greater height than it could support from the slenderness of the stalk would be to suppose what never happened not only with respect to that particular flower, the carnation, but with respect to any other flower, or plant, or animal, or any other body whatever. We know that climate has such an effect that what are plants with us, in the tropical climates become large trees: but the necessary proportion between the size or weight of the plant, and the strength of the stalk that is to support it, is what no change of soil or climate can supersede, unless we could supersede the law of gravitation itself. The mere experimental or historical proof is here then buttressed up by the general rule, or reason of the thing.—I have always seen a stone fall to the ground; I remember a house always to have stood where it does; a hill has never stirred from the place where I first saw it. Is the inference to be drawn from these different cases equally certain? Am I to conclude that the house will last as long as the mountain, because I have the same positive evidence of their permanence? No: because though I have never seen any alteration in that particular house, I have seen other houses pulled down and built up; and besides, from the size of the objects, the shape and nature of the materials, I know that one of them may be very easily destroyed,