62

O.60

and such ideas of his environment as, coming over primeval man during his wandering in the forest, while he yet had but the vaguest notion of error, he managed to communicate to some fellow, (and so became a prophet,) there yawns a chasm over which we are building a cantilever bridge, Induction making it cohere, but every step of advance being first laid by Retroduction alone; that is, by the spontaneous conjectures of instinctive reason; neither Deduction nor Induction contributing a single new concept. Nor is this less true of the Inquiries that self interest prompts. This establishes far beyond all reasonable doubt that the human mind has an inherent tendency to guess right, independently of reasons, that I feel shame in condescending to argue such a point. Nevertheless, I will give one among half-a-dozen independent proofs of it. It is evident, as DeMorgan first showed, that the members of any possible collection, or arbitrary list, of singulars must have some character at once common and peculiar to them: whence it follows that there must be as many independent characters as there are of possible single things; reckoning any singular and any part of it as distinct things; and evidently there must be as many logically simple hypotheses that might be proposed to explain any given hypothesis. Now well known facts enable us to assert that of corpuscles alone there are more than 10⁶⁴ in the visible universe. But 10¹⁴ being the number of seconds in three million years exceeds the number of hypotheses mankind would ever yet have