Yet day and night are not the causes of one another; why?
Because their sequence, though invariable in our experience, is not
unconditionally so: those facts only succeed each other, provided that
the presence and absence of the sun succeed each other, and if this
alternation were to cease, we might have either day or night unfollowed
by one another. There are thus two kinds of uniformities of succession,
the one unconditional, the other conditional on the first: laws of
causation, and other successions dependent on those laws. All ultimate
laws are laws of causation, and the only universal law beyond the pale
of mathematics is the law of universal causation, namely, that every
phaenomenon has a phaenomenal cause; has some phaenomenon other than
itself, or some combination of phaenomena, on which it is invariably and
unconditionally consequent. It is on the universality of this law that
the possibility rests of establishing a canon of Induction. A general
proposition inductively obtained is only then proved to be true, when
the instances on which it rests are such that if they have been
correctly observed, the falsity of the generalization would be
inconsistent with the constancy of causation; with the universality of
the fact that the phaenomena of nature take place according to
invariable laws of succession.
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