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an induction hold true. Only, I will here pause for an instant to drop a tear upon the tomb of John Stuart Mill. Here was a young man brought up in the strictest sect of the Ockhamists, of whom his father was the Grand Master in his day. That which was dearest to the heart of the Ockhamist was to deny the reality of anything of the nature of Law in nature. If we go back to Ockham himself and ask ourselves what excuse he had for such a contention, the answer is that it was because Duns Scotus, his master, evoked too many of these general beings without stopping to prove their reality. That is true. The Scotist saw laws or generals on
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every hand, laws of laws, laws of laws of laws, and left experience a little too much out of account. And yet Scotus never did leave individuals out of account. Only he was not an experimental philosopher. He was, on the contrary a monk, sworn to separate himself from the things of this world. Now the things of this world and the Papacy, which at that day appeared to the logician as a wholly inconsistent meddling of general ideas with existences came into conflict, and Ockham stood up manfully for experience and for positive fact. Very well; Ockhamism became a great tradition. The tradition was that generals are mere words, and have no reality. James Mill, the father of John Stuart
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Mill brought out all the truth there was in that view in a masterly work,— a great solitary performance in the history of philosophy,— his Analysis of the Human Mind. John Stuart Mill was his son. Imbued, as were Bain and Grote and others, with this doctrine,— this sacred truth as it seemed to them and as it really was, in so far as it was opposed to certain ideas, yet extravagantly pushed and denying what it had no justification in denying. It was on the whole a Denying doctrine. From the sacred Denial John Sturart Mill drew his mother's milk. To him loyalty to Truth and loyalty to Ockhamism were inseparable.
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But should it happen by any impossible conjuncture that they were opposed there can be no doubt that it would be Truth to which Stuart Mill would be faithful to even to the stake. It was a most dreary world,— the universe as the Ockhamists conceived it. It utterly sickened Stuart Mill. But that, as he conceived it, was the only universe there was,— the only universe that was so much as imaginable. Anything of the nature of a Law was, according to that creed, nothing but a word,— a nothing. Yet Stuart Mill having to ask himself what makes Inductions hold good, replied the Uniformity of Nature. The word law was concealed for his apprehension behind this word Uniformity. But after all, what is the difference between saying that there is
