78 Transac tions . — Miscellaneous . 



of an ideal is indeed applicable to the genesis of all that is 

 organized or constructed by us, even to those things that we 

 ordinarily look upon as being made offhand in accordance 

 with a copy. It is only the last stage that is thus accom- 

 plished. One can set himself nowadays to construct a triple- 

 expansion engine, and need no other equipment for his task 

 than care and patience and ordinary intelligence. But could 

 any one have done it fifty years ago ? The steps in engine- 

 construction between that day and this have been achieved by 

 a mental process analogous to that by which poems are written 

 and Constitutions are developed. We are becoming daily 

 more and more fully conscious of this fact. We can perceive 

 that though Brunei could not build a " Great Eastern " that 

 would work, the progress of naval construction since his time 

 renders it probable that our descendants will build vessels of 

 vastly greater magnitude than it. We do not set ourselves 

 now to make wings and, having made them, leap into space, 

 but we are still further from laying it down as beyond question 

 that aerial navigation is for ever impossible. Bather we set 

 ourselves to estimate what progress has been made over a 

 period of ten or twenty years past in diminishing the propor- 

 tion which the weight of engines must bear to the motor- 

 power that they can develope, and on this basis to calculate 

 what progress the next ten or twenty years are likely to see 

 made in the direction of the solution of our problem. Simi- 

 larly, in matters political, we have travelled far since the days 

 when Locke or Eousseau saw in the relation between king 

 and people the result of some conscious bargain deliberately 

 "made" at the dawn of history; or since the days when 

 the sages of the Directory had religious in their pigeon-holes, 

 ready to be made actual by an edict from head-quarters. Even 

 socialism — at any rate Fabian socialism — recognises now that 

 it must reckon more or less with nature and its gradual pro- 

 cesses. We are beginning to find out that there are many 

 things in the world that are organized and systematized yet 

 which cannot be said to be " made." " Making " is a deduc- 

 tive process only : it gives effect in the real world to an 

 abstract rule. The process by wdiich the rule itself has been, 

 obtained belongs also to thought, but to the province of induc- 

 tion. It is induction that we find taking place whenever the 

 evolution of anything is the result. 



A theory of the reason that would adequately define the 

 separate provinces of induction and deduction is still a desi- 

 deratum m logic. Mr. Mill's theory is by no means consist- 

 ent with itself. In the body of his work he treats the two as 

 co-ordinate processes, which achieve the same end by different 

 means. In the chapter on "Deduction," on the contrary, we 

 find hiin maintaining that every deduction has in it three stages 



