In speaking of induction as a process of going from the particular to the general, this does not signify that the process deals with individual notions. The particulars in an inductive process are particular cases giving rise to particular judgments, and judgments involve concepts, or general ideas. When, in the inductive process, it is asserted that air holds the card to the glass, the mind is seeking to establish a relation between the notions air and pressure, and is, therefore, thinking in concepts. For this reason, it is usually said that induction takes for granted ordinary relations as involved in our everyday concepts, and concerns itself only with the more hidden relations of things. The significance of induction as a process of going from the particular to the general, therefore, consists in the fact that the conclusion is held to be a wider judgment than is contained in any of the premises.
=Particular Truth Implies the General.=--Describing the premises of an inductive process as particular truths, and the conclusion as a universal truth, however, involves the same fiction as was noted in separating the percept and the concept into two distinct types of notions. In the first place, my particular judgment, that air presses the card against the glass, is itself a deduction resting upon other general principles. Secondly, if the judgment that air presses the card against the glass contains no element of universal truth, then a thousand such judgments could give no universal truth. Moreover, if the mind approaches a process of induction with a problem, or hypothesis, before it, the general truth is already apprehended hypothetically in thought even before the particular instances are examined. When we set out, for instance, to investigate whether the line joining the bisecting points of the sides of a triangle is parallel with the base, we have accepted hypothetically the general principle that such lines are parallel with the base. The fact is, therefore, that when the mind examines the particular case and finds it to agree with the hypothesis, so far as it accepts this case as a truth, it also accepts it as a universal truth. Although, therefore, induction may involve going from one particular experiment or observation to another, it is in a sense a process of going from the general to the general.