Belief in the uniformity of nature is an induction from _experience_, and not a primary intuition. And by the word experience, in this connection, we must understand not the experience of one man only, or of one generation, but the accumulated experience of mankind in all ages as registered in books or transmitted by tradition. But how limited, at best, is human experience--how circumscribed both in time and space! Compared with the vastness and duration of the universe, it is narrowed down to a mere point. All experience, be it that of the individual or of mankind, is only finite. To infer a universal law from a limited number of instances is to violate to the uttermost the fundamental canon of logic that "no conclusion must contain more than was contained in the premises from which it is drawn."[237] Inductive science can only give us the contingent and the relative, it can never attain to the necessary and the absolute. By abstraction, comparison, and generalization it may furnish us with _general_ notions, but it can not give us _universal_ principles. "Experience can not conduct us to universal and necessary truths--not to universal, because she has not tried all cases; not to necessary, because necessity is not a matter to which experience can testify."[238] The intuitive reason, we doubt not, is furnished with necessary and universal principles which may illuminate the pathway of experience, and give meaning and law to the facts of sensation, so that man may become "the Interpreter of Nature;" but certainly the absolute uniformity of nature is not one of these ideas.