Table of Instances

¹⁴ Anyone can see how poor we are in history, since in the above tables, besides occasionally inserting traditions and report instead of approved history and authentic instances (always, however, adding some note if their credit or authority be doubtful), we are often forced to subjoin, “Let the experiment be tried—Let further inquiry be made.”

¹⁵ We call the use of these 3 tables the “presenting a review of instances to the understanding”.

When this has been done, induction itself is to be brought into action.

For on an individual review of all the instances a nature is to be found, such as always to be present and absent with the given nature, to increase and decrease with it, and, as we have said, to form a more common limit of the nature.

If the mind attempt this affirmatively from the first (which it always will when left to itself), there will spring up phantoms, mere theories and ill-defined notions, with axioms requiring daily correction.

These will be better or worse, according to the power and strength of the understanding which creates them. But it is only for God (the bestower and[147] creator of forms), and perhaps for angels and intelligences, at once to recognize forms affirmatively at the first glance of contemplation: man, at lest, is unable to do so, and is only allowed to proceed first by negatives, and then to conclude with affirmatives, after every species of exclusion.

¹⁶ We must, therefore, effect a complete solution and separation of nature; not by fire, but by the mind, that divine fire.

The first work of legitimate induction, in the discovery of forms, is rejection, or the exclusive instances of individual natures, which are not found in some one instance where the given nature is present, or are found in any one instance where it is absent, or are found to increase in any one instance where the given nature decreases, or the reverse.

After an exclusion correctly effected, an affirmative form will remain as the residuum, solid, true, and well defined, while all volatile opinions go off in smoke.

This is readily said; but we must arrive at it by a circuitous route. We shall perhaps, however, omit nothing that can facilitate our progress.

¹⁷ The first and almost perpetual precaution and warning which we consider necessary is that none should suppose from the great part assigned by us to forms, that we mean such forms as the meditations and thoughts of men have hitherto been accustomed to.

In the first place, we do not at present mean the concrete forms, which (as we have observed) are in the common course of things compounded of simple natures, as those of a lion, an eagle, a rose, gold, or the like. The moment for discussing these will arrive when we come to treat of the latent process and latent conformation, and the discovery of them as they exist in what are called substances, or concrete natures.

Nor again, would we be thought to mean (even when treating of simple natures) any abstract forms or ideas, either undefined or badly defined in matter. For when we speak of forms, we mean nothing else than those laws and regulations of simple action which arrange and constitute any simple nature, such as heat, light, weight, in every species of matter, and in a susceptible subject.

The form of heat or form of light, therefore, means no more than the law of heat or the law of light.

Nor do we ever abstract or withdraw ourselves from things, and the operative branch of philosophy. When, therefore, we say (for instance) in our investigation of the form of heat, Reject rarity, or, Rarity is not of the form of heat, it is the same as if we were to say, Man can superinduce heat on a dense body, or the reverse, Man can abstract or ward off heat from a rare body.

The heat of the heavenly bodies appears to be very different from that of fire. The fixed red of the rose is different from the red in the rainbow[101]. Death by drowning is different from death by burning. Yet they all agree in the common natures as forms of heat, redness, and death

Our forms appear to be somewhat abstracted from their mingling and uniting heterogeneous objects.

let him be assured that his understanding is inthralled by habit, by general appearances and hypotheses.

However heterogeneous and distinct, they agree in the form or law which regulates heat, redness, or death.

Human power cannot be emancipated and freed from the common[149] course of nature, and expanded and exalted to new efficients and new modes of operation, except by the revelation and invention of forms of this nature.

But after this[102] union of nature, which is the principal point, we will afterward, in its proper place, treat of the divisions and ramifications of nature, whether ordinary or internal and more real.