“When remembering a certain thing as in a certain place, the place and the
thing are mentally represented together; while to think of the
non-existence of the thing in that place implies a consciousness in which
the place is represented, but not the thing. Similarly, if instead of
thinking of an object as colorless, we think of its having color, the
change consists in the addition to the concept of an element that was
before absent from it—the object can not be thought of first as red and
then as not red, without one component of the thought being totally
expelled from the mind by another. The law of the Excluded Middle, then,
is simply a generalization of the universal experience that some mental
states are directly destructive of other states. It formulates a certain
absolutely constant law, that the appearance of any positive mode of
consciousness can not occur without excluding a correlative negative mode;
and that the negative mode can not occur without excluding the correlative
positive mode: the antithesis of positive and negative being, indeed,
merely an expression of this experience. Hence it follows that if
consciousness is not in one of the two modes it must be in the other.”(99)
I must here close this supplementary chapter, and with it the Second Book.
The theory of Induction, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, will
form the subject of the Third.
Book III.
OF INDUCTION.
“According to the doctrine now stated, the highest, or rather the
only proper object of physics, is to ascertain those established
conjunctions of successive events, which constitute the order of
the universe; to record the phenomena which it exhibits to our
observations, or which it discloses to our experiments; and to
refer these phenomena to their general laws.”—D. STEWART,
_Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind_, vol. ii., chap.
iv., sect. 1.
“In such cases the inductive and deductive methods of inquiry may
be said to go hand in hand, the one verifying the conclusions
deduced by the other; and the combination of experiment and
theory, which may thus be brought to bear in such cases, forms an
engine of discovery infinitely more powerful than either taken
separately. This state of any department of science is perhaps of
all others the most interesting, and that which promises the most
to research.”—SIR J. HERSCHEL, _Discourse on the Study of Natural
Philosophy_.
Chapter I.
Preliminary Observations On Induction In General.