NAMING. 211 



belief or expectation which follows, and by which we recognise 

 as having taken place, or as about to take place, that of which 

 we have perceived a mark, there is evidently no need of 

 language. And this inference of one particular fact from 

 another is a case of induction. It is of this sort of induction 

 that brutes are capable : it is in this shape that uncultivated 

 minds make almost all their inductions, and that we all do so 

 in the cases in which familiar experience forces our con 

 clusions upon us without any active process of inquiry on our 

 part, and in which the belief or expectation follows the 

 suggestion of the evidence, with the promptitude and certainty 

 of an instinct.* 



3. But though inference of an inductive character is 

 possible without the use of signs, it could never, without 

 them, be carried much beyond the very simple cases which 

 we have just described, and which form, in all probability, the 

 limit of the reasonings of those animals to whom conventional 

 language is unknown. Without language, or something 

 equivalent to it, there could only be as much reasoning 

 from experience as can take place without the aid of general 

 propositions. Now, though in strictness we may reason from 

 past experience to a fresh individual case without the inter 

 mediate stage of a general proposition, yet without general 

 propositions we should seldom remember what past experience 

 we have had, and scarcely ever what conclusions that experience 

 will warrant. The division of the inductive process into 

 two parts, the first ascertaining what is a mark of the given 

 fact, the second whether in the new case that mark exists, 



I am speaking not of the powers themselves, but of the previous conditions 

 necessary to enable those powers to exert themselves : of which conditions I 

 am contending that language is not one, senses and association being sufficient 

 without it. 



* Mr. Bailey agrees with me in thinking that whenever &quot;from something 

 actually present to my senses conjoined with past experience, I feel satisfied 

 that something has happened, or will happen, or is happening, beyond the sphere 

 of my personal observation,&quot; I may with strict propriety be said to reason : and 

 of course to reason inductively, for demonstrative reasoning is excluded by the 

 circumstances of the case. (The Theory of Reasoning, 2nd ed. p. 27.) 



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