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day; but you cannot tell me the number of keys in my bunch, nor the amount of money in my pocket, nor the metal of my watch, whether it be gold or silver or any thing else. The reason is that while there is a fixed unalterable order according to which a Monday is always followed by a Tuesday, there is and can be no fixed invariable rule, neither nature's nor man's, that I would always have so many and only so many keys in my ring, or only so many rupees and neither more nor less in my pocket, or that my watch should be made of one particu. lar metal and never of any other. If there were even one single exception in the case of a Tuesday following Monday, you could not say with certainty that it would be Tuesday tomorrow, for it might be the turn of the exception, in which case it would not be a Tuesday but some other day that would occur tomorrow. From these cases we can deduce the principle that wherever there is an invariable rule, without a single exception, there alone can a logical conclusion be drawn in agree. ment with that rule; and that no proper inference is possible in the absence, or in defiance, of such a fixed unalterable rule. This is the one simple rule of logic which every one understands more or less clearly, and a text book must be deemed to have failed to fulfil its function if it muddle up such a simple proposition. It is according to this rule that the illiterate rustic, and, for the matter of that, even a moderately small child who sees smoke issuing from a place, immediately infers the presence of fire there. Your cultured "text-book”
METHOD OF COMPARISON
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