A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. II

by John Stuart Mill

In the same manner with these derivative uniformities of succession, a great variety of uniformities of coexistence also take their rise. Coordinate effects of the same cause naturally coexist with one another. High water at any point on the earth's surface, and high water at the point diametrically opposite to it, are effects uniformly simultaneous, resulting from the direction in which the combined attractions of the sun and moon act upon the waters of the ocean. An eclipse of the sun to us, and an eclipse of the earth to a spectator situated in the moon, are in like manner phenomena invariably coexistent; and their coexistence can equally be deduced from the laws of their production.

It is an obvious question, therefore, whether all the uniformities of coexistence among phenomena may not be accounted for in this manner. And it cannot be doubted that between phenomena which are themselves effects, the coexistences must necessarily depend on the causes of those phenomena. If they are effects immediately or remotely of the same cause, they cannot coexist except by virtue of some laws or properties of that cause: if they are effects of different causes, they cannot coexist unless it be because their causes coexist; and the uniformity of coexistence, if such there be, between the effects, proves that those particular causes, within the limits of our observation, have uniformly been coexistent.

[§ 2.] But these same considerations compel us to recognise that there must be one class of coexistences which cannot depend on causation; the coexistences between the ultimate properties of things—those properties which are the causes of all phenomena, but are not themselves caused by any phenomenon, and a cause for which could only be sought by ascending to the origin of all things. Yet among these ultimate properties there are not only coexistences, but uniformities of coexistence. General propositions may be, and are, formed, which assert that whenever certain properties are found, certain others are found along with them. We perceive an object; say, for instance, water. We recognise it to be water, of course by certain of its properties. Having recognised it, we are able to affirm of it innumerable other properties; which we could not do unless it were a general truth, a law or uniformity in nature, that the set of properties by which we identify the substance as water, always have those other properties conjoined with them.

In a former place,[31] it has been explained in some detail what is meant by the Kinds of objects; those classes which differ from one another not by a limited and definite, but by an indefinite and unknown, number of distinctions. To this we have now to add, that every proposition by which anything is asserted of a Kind, affirms an uniformity of coexistence. Since we know nothing of Kinds but their properties, the Kind, to us, is the set of properties by which it is identified, and which must of course be sufficient to distinguish it from every other kind.[32] In affirming anything, therefore, of a Kind, we are affirming something to be uniformly coexistent with the properties by which the kind is recognised; and that is the sole meaning of the assertion.

Among the uniformities of coexistence which exist in nature, may hence be numbered all the properties of Kinds. The whole of these, however, are not independent of causation, but only a portion of them. Some are ultimate properties, others derivative; of some, no cause can be assigned, but others are manifestly dependent on causes. Thus, pure atmospheric air is a Kind, and one of its most unequivocal properties is its gaseous form: this property, however, has for its cause the presence of a certain quantity of latent heat; and if that heat could be taken away (as has been done from so many gases in Faraday's experiments), the gaseous form would doubtless disappear, together with numerous other properties which depend on, or are caused by, that property.

In regard to all substances which are chemical compounds, and which therefore may be regarded as products of the juxtaposition of substances different in Kind from themselves, there is considerable reason to presume that the specific properties of the compound are consequent, as effects, on some of the properties of the elements, though little progress has yet been made in tracing any invariable relation between the latter and the former. Still more strongly will a similar presumption exist, when the object itself, as in the case of organized beings, is no primeval agent, but an effect, which depends on a cause or causes for its very existence. The Kinds therefore which are called in chemistry simple substances, or elementary natural agents, are the only ones, any of whose properties can with certainty be considered ultimate; and of these the ultimate properties are probably much more numerous that we at present recognise, since every successful instance of the resolution of the properties of their compounds into simpler laws, generally leads to the recognition of properties in the elements distinct from any previously known. 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, of chemical composition, electricity, magnetism, &c., 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 recognise in one and the same object: the coexistences of which properties must accordingly be ranked among the ultimate generalities of nature.

[§ 3.] There are, therefore, only two kinds of propositions which assert uniformity of coexistence between properties. Either the properties depend on causes, or they do not. If they do, the proposition which affirms them to be coexistent is a derivative law of coexistence between effects, and until resolved into the laws of causation on which it depends, is an empirical law, and to be tried by the principles of induction to which such laws are amenable. If, on the other hand, the properties do not depend on causes, but are ultimate properties; then if it be true that they invariably coexist, they must all be ultimate properties of one and the same Kind; and it is of these only that the coexistences can be classed as a peculiar sort of laws of nature.

When we affirm that all crows are black, or that all negroes have woolly hair, we assert an uniformity of coexistence. We assert that the property of blackness, or of having woolly hair, invariably coexists with the properties which, in common language, or in the scientific classification that we adopt, are taken to constitute the class crow, or the class negro. Now, supposing blackness to be an ultimate property of black objects, or woolly hair an ultimate property of the animals which possess it; supposing that these properties are not results of causation, are not connected with antecedent phenomena by any law; then if all crows are black, and all negroes have woolly hair, these must be ultimate properties of the Kind crow, or negro, or of some Kind which includes them. If, on the contrary, blackness or woolly hair be an effect depending on causes, these general propositions are manifestly empirical laws; and all that has already been said respecting that class of generalizations may be applied without modification to these.

Now, we have seen that in the case of all compounds—of all things, in short, except the elementary substances and primary powers of nature—the presumption is, that the properties do really depend upon causes; and it is impossible in any case whatever to be certain that they do not. We therefore should not be safe in claiming for any generalization respecting the coexistence of properties, a degree of certainty to which, if the properties should happen to be the result of causes, it would have no claim. A generalization respecting coexistence, or in other words respecting the properties of Kinds, may be an ultimate truth, but it may, also, be merely a derivative one; and since, if so, it is one of those derivative laws which are neither laws of causation, nor have been resolved into the laws of causation on which they depend, it can possess no higher degree of evidence than belongs to an empirical law.

[§ 4.] This conclusion will be confirmed by the consideration of one great deficiency, which precludes the application to the ultimate uniformities of coexistence, of a system of rigorous scientific induction, such as the uniformities in the succession of phenomena have been found to admit of. The basis of such a system is wanting: there is no general axiom, standing in the same relation to the uniformities of coexistence as the law of causation does to those of succession. The Methods of Induction applicable to the ascertainment of causes and effects, are grounded on the principle that everything which has a beginning must have some cause or other; that among the circumstances which actually existed at the time of its commencement, there is certainly some one combination, on which the effect in question is unconditionally consequent, and on the repetition of which it would certainly again recur. But in an inquiry whether some kind (as crow) universally possesses a certain property (as blackness), there is no room for any assumption analogous to this. We have no previous certainty that the property must have something which constantly coexists with it; must have an invariable coexistent, in the same manner as an event must have an invariable antecedent. When we feel pain, we must be in some circumstances under which if exactly repeated we should always feel pain. But when we are conscious of blackness, it does not follow that there is something else present of which blackness is a constant accompaniment. There is, therefore, no room for elimination; no Method of Agreement or Difference, or of Concomitant Variations (which is but a modification either of the Method of Agreement or of the Method of Difference). We cannot conclude that the blackness we see in crows must be an invariable property of crows, merely because there is nothing else present of which it can be an invariable property. We therefore inquire into the truth of a proposition like "All crows are black," under the same disadvantage as if, in our inquiries into causation, we were compelled to let in, as one of the possibilities, that the effect may in that particular instance have arisen without any cause at all.