Caklile. — On the Ultimate Problem of Pliilosopliy . 79 



— au induction, a ratiocination, and a verification. That is the 

 true account, I think, of every process of conscious reasoning. 

 We can only draw a hue that will afford the basis for cousist- 

 ■ent treatment between induction and deduction by regarding 

 the former, substantially as Whewell does, as "the light that 

 goes up " — the happy thought, the illuminating generalisation 

 to which no methods are applicable ; and the latter as the 

 process by which such generalisations are in the end either 

 confirmed or rejected. The so-called inductive methods can 

 be applicable only to ratiocination and the verification. This 

 view corresponds with Mr. Mill's own description, in the earlier 

 part of his work, of reasoning from particulars to generals as 

 the process of mother- wit of the shrewd, untaught intelligence. 

 It may be possible thus to see some truth in the striking 

 thought of Emerson : " Generalisation is always a new influx 

 of divinity into the mind — hence the thrill that attends." 

 The deductive process of " making" could, then, very plainly 

 be only the process of human minds, whose workings are based 

 on abstraction ; and it seems, moreover, that it only corre- 

 sponds to one aspect even of their processes, and that not a 

 universal one. It may thus, I think, yet become possible for 

 us to comprehend that, thougli we must give up the concep- 

 tion of " making " as applicable to the genesis of the world, we 

 may still hold to the belief thac it is the work of mind, and 

 even of that description of mind of which our own is an imper- 

 fect image. 



The philosophy of Hegel has familiarised us with the 

 thought of pairs of complementary conceptions, one of which 

 is and must be implicit in the other — though those who are 

 loudest in affirming either of the two are often farthest from 

 recognising that they at the same time affirm its comple- 

 ment. " People have only to know what they say," as he 

 observes, "in order to find the infinite in the finite." The 

 category of complementai'y conceptions is applicable to many 

 others besides those of the infinite and the finite. The con- 

 ception, for example, of the possible illusoriness of vision, of 

 which Hume made so much use, plainly postulated the pos- 

 session by us of some trustworthy standard by comparison 

 with which the information that vision gave us might be pro- 

 nounced either illusory or valid ; yet with the recognition of 

 this fact his theory of subjective idealism must necessarily 

 have vanished. In the history of the world, indeed, as we 

 find it, it often takes many generations for a thought that is 

 there already as implicit to become explicit. Hence it is the 

 rule rather than the exception with intellectual movements 

 that they stop short at a stage that seems to us, on looking 

 back at them, to be very obviously only an intermediate one. 

 One wonders how, in the sixteenth century, the assertion of 



