NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF INFERENCE 399 



this meaning, and of the knowledge it conveys to him about 

 reality, without being in conscious possession of a further fund of 

 knowledge, which is nevertheless obtainable from what he already 

 possesses about that reality, if he only brings the analytic and 

 synthetic activity of his reason to bear on what he already pos 

 sesses, and on the reality it reveals to him : if he only analyses 

 further the extension and intension of the concepts which con 

 stitute the judgments he has already formed : if he only compares 

 and relates mentally the objects or aspects of reality which 

 those various concepts reveal to him : if he only reverts again and 

 again to the data which his external and internal senses have 

 offered to his intellect about the reality : these data furnishing 

 the activity of his intellect with grounds and foundations for the 

 establishment of new intellectual relations between the concepts 

 which he has already formed and already compared with one 

 another in antecedent judgments, in other words, with grounds 

 for new judgments about these data. And, this being undoubtedly 

 the case, we can see that the possibility, or rather the fact, of 

 inference, though it presents at first sight an appearance of con 

 tradiction for which it has been called a &quot;paradox,&quot; contains 

 nothing that is really contradictory. 



For, when we say that the conclusion, compared with the 

 &quot; known &quot; premisses, contains a &quot; new,&quot; &quot; additional,&quot; &quot; unknown &quot; 

 truth, we do not at all mean that this latter is so totally inde 

 pendent of, and disconnected with, the former, as to be utterly 

 underivable from it by any activity of the mind : if it were, all 

 advance in knowledge by way of inference would be impossible. 

 We mean simply that it is &quot; new,&quot; &quot; additional,&quot; &quot; unknown,&quot; 

 etc., in so far as it is not yet actually possessed in consciousness, 

 as actual knowledge, by the mind. This, however, is in no way 

 incompatible with its being potentially, virtually, latent in our 

 knowledge of the premisses, i.e. contained in them in such a way 

 that, by the activity of the mind, by the exercise of our mental 

 energy (&quot;vtrtute&quot; mentis), on these premisses, it can be drawn 

 out from its latent, potential state, into the form of explicit, 

 actual knowledge. 



And, similarly, when we say that in the process of inference 

 the conclusion must follow necessarily from the premisses, we do 

 not by any means commit ourselves to the view that before the 

 process of inference takes place, before that mental work in which 

 the process of inference consists, has commenced, the conclusion 



