[423]Mill's "Logic," I. 526.
[424]See chapter 9, book VI. V. 2, 478, on The Physical or Concrete Deductive Method as applied to Sociology; and chapter 13, book III, for explanations, after Liebig, of Decomposition, Respiration, the Action of Poisons, etc. A whole book is devoted to the logic of the moral sciences; I know no better treatise on the subject.
[425]Mill's "Logic," II. 4.
[426]"There exists in nature a number of Permanent Causes, which have subsisted ever since the human race has been in existence, and for an indefinite and probably an enormous length of time previous. The sun, the earth, and planets, with their various constituents, air, water, and the other distinguishable substances, whether simple or compound, of which nature is made up, are such Permanent Causes. They have existed, and the effects or consequences which they were fitted to produce have taken place (as often as the other conditions of the production met), from the very beginning of our experience. But we can give no account of the origin of the Permanent Causes themselves."—Mill's "Logic," I. 378.
[427]"The resolution of the laws of the heavenly motions established the previously unknown ultimate property of a mutual attraction between all bodies: the resolution, so far as it has yet proceeded, of the laws of crystallization, or chemical composition, electricity, magnetism, etc., points to various polarities, ultimately inherent in the particles of which bodies are composed; the comparative atomic weights of different kinds of bodies were ascertained by resolving, into more general laws, the uniformities observed in the proportions in which substances combine with one another; and so forth. Thus, although every resolution of a complex uniformity into simpler and more elementary laws has an apparent tendency to diminish the number of the ultimate properties, and really does remove many properties from the list; yet (since the result of this simplifying process is to trace up an ever greater variety of different effects to the same agents), the further we advance in this direction, the greater number of distinct properties we are forced to recognize in one and the same object; the coexistences of which properties must accordingly be ranked among the ultimate generalities of nature."—Mill's "Logic," II. 108.
[428]Ibid. I. 378.
[429]Mill's "Logic," II. 95.
[430]Mill's "Logic," II. 104.
[431]See the Posterior Analytics, which are much superior to the Prior—δί αίνίων κα ηρότέρων.
[432]An eminent student of Physical Science said to me: "A fact is a superposition of laws."