SECT. 9.] Objective Treatment of Logic. 275 



material logician has to superintend the process of converting 

 as much as possible of these unknown phenomena into what 

 are known, of aggregating them, as we have said above, about 

 the nucleus of certain data which experience and observation 

 had to start with. In so doing his principal resources are 

 the Methods of Induction, of which something has been 

 said in a former chapter; another resource is found in the 

 Theory of Probability, and another in Deduction. 



Now, however such language may be objected to as 

 savouring of Conceptualism, I can see no better compendious 

 way of describing these processes than by saying that we are 

 engaged in getting at conceptions of these external pheno 

 mena, and as far as possible converting these conceptions 

 into facts. What is the natural history of facts if we trace 

 them back to their origin ? They first come into being as 

 mere guesses or conjectures, as contemplated possibilities 

 whose correspondence with reality is either altogether dis 

 believed or regarded as entirely doubtful. In this stage, of 

 course, their contrast with facts is sharp enough. How they 

 arise it does not belong to Logic but to Psychology to say. 

 Logic indeed has little or nothing to do with them whilst 

 they are in this form. Everyone is busy all his life in enter 

 taining such guesses upon various subjects, the superiority of 

 the philosopher over the common man being mainly found in 

 the quality of his guesses, and in the skill and persistence 

 with which he sifts and examines them. In the next stage 



o 



they mostly go by the name of theories or hypotheses, when 

 they are comprehensive in their scope, or are in any way on 

 a scale of grandeur and importance : when however they are 

 of a trivial kind, or refer to details, we really have no distinc 

 tive or appropriate name for them, and must be content 

 therefore to call them conceptions. Through this stage 

 they flit with great rapidity in Inductive Logic ; often the 



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