ILLUSTRATION'S OF THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE. 71 7 



I know ; but, then, in the present case the inference is that pretty- 

 much all Cretans are liars, and whether there may not be a special 

 improbability in that I do not know. 



Late in the last century, Immanuel Kant asked the question, 

 "How are synthetical judgments a priori possible?" By synthet- 

 ical judgments he meant such as assert positive fact and are not 

 mere affairs of arrangement; in short, judgments of the kind which 

 synthetical reasoning produces, and which analytic reasoning cannot 

 yield. By a priori judgments he meant such as that all outward ob- 

 jects are in space, every event has a cause, etc., propositions which 

 according to him can never be inferred from experience. Not so 

 much by his answer to this question as by the mere asking of it, the 

 current philosophy of that time was shattered and destroyed, and a 

 new epoch in its history was begun. But before asking that question 

 he ought to have asked the more general one, "How are any synthet- 

 ical judgments at all possible ? " How is it that a man can observe 

 one fact and straightway pronounce judgment concerning another 

 different fact not involved in the first? Such reasoning, as we have 

 seen, has, at least in the usual sense of the phrase, no definite proba- 

 bility; how, then, can it add to our knowledge? Tins is a strange 

 paradox ; the Abbe Gratry says it is a miracle, and that every true 

 induction is an immediate inspiration from on high. 1 I respect this 

 explanation far more than many a pedantic attempt to solve the ques- 

 tion by some juggle with probabilities, with the forms of syllogism, 

 or what not. I respect it because it shows an appreciation of the 

 depth of the problem, because it assigns an adequate cause, and be- 

 cause it is intimately connected as the true account should be 

 with a general philosophy of the universe. At the same time, I do 

 not accept this explanation, because an explanation should tell how 

 a thing is done, and to assert a perpetual miracle seems to be an 

 abandonment of all hope of doing that, without sufficient justification. 



It will be interesting to see how the answer which Kant gave to 

 his question about synthetical judgments a priori will appear if ex- 

 tended to the question of synthetical judgments in general. That 

 answer is, that synthetical judgments a priori are possible because 

 whatever is universally true is involved in the conditions of expe- 

 rience. Let us apply this to a general synthetical reasoning. I take 

 from a bag a handful of beans ; they are all purple, and I infer that 

 all the beans in the bag are purple. How can I do that ? Why, upon 

 the principle that whatever is universally true of my experience (which 



1 Logique. The same is true, according to him, of every performance of a differen- 

 tiation, but not of integration. He does not tell us whether it is the supernatural assist- 

 ance which makes the former process so much the easier. 



