limited
number of observations. And, however numerous these may be, they can
show nothing with regard to the infinite number of cases in which the
experiment has not been made. Experience, being thus unable to prove a
fact to be universal, is, as will readily be seen, still more
incapable of proving a fact to be necessary. Experience cannot,
indeed, offer the smallest ground for the necessity of a proposition.
She can observe and record what has happened; but she cannot find, in
any case, or in any accumulation of cases, any reason for what _must_
happen. She may see objects side by side, but she cannot see a reason
why they must be ever side by side. She finds certain events to occur
in succession; but the succession supplies, in its occurrence, no
reason for its recurrence. She contemplates external objects; but she
cannot detect any internal bond which indissolubly connects the future
with the past, the possible with the real. To learn a proposition by
experience, and to see it to be necessarily true, are two altogether
different processes of thought.

"But it may be said, that we do learn, by means of observation and
experience, many universal truths; indeed, all the general truths of
which science consists. Is not the doctrine of universal gravitation
learned by experience? Are not the laws of motion, the properties of
light, the general properties of chemistry, so learned? How, with
these examples before us, can we say that experience teaches no
universal truths?

"To this we reply, that these truths can only be known to be
_general_, not universal, if they depend upon experience alone.
Experience cannot bestow that universality which she herself cannot
have, and that necessity of which she has no comprehension. If these
doctrines are universally true, this universality flows from the
_ideas_ which we apply to our experience, and which are, as we have
seen, the real sources of necessary truth. How far these ideas can
communicate their universality and necessity to the results of
experience, it will hereafter be our business to consider. It will
then appear, that when the mind collects from observation truths of a
wide and comprehensive kind, which approach to the simplicity and
universality of the truths of pure science; she gives them this
character by throwing upon them the light of her own fundamental
ideas."--_Whewell_, Vol. I. p. 60.

Accordingly, Mr Whewell no sooner arrives at any truth which admits of