THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



while in this state, do not actually contain the conclusion among 

 them ; they contain it virtually : which means simply that the 

 mind has the power, whether it chooses to exert it or not, of so 

 analysing, arranging, comparing these materials, that, of them 

 selves, and without calling in the aid of any extraneous factor, 

 they will necessarily yield the conclusion (197). It is in doing 

 this that the labour and the progress of inference lie. Let us 

 suppose this work done. The materials are now in an ordered 

 or formed state, more proximate to the desired conclusion than in 

 the previous state ; for now they are held together in conscious 

 ness in the form of two judgments of such a character that the 

 mind which consciously formulates them cannot help seeing a third 

 judgment involved in them. In this state they contain the con 

 clusion not virtually but actually ; but when this state is reached, 

 the mind has done its work, the act of inference is already completed. 



It is quite possible, therefore, for the mind to be in possession 

 of the materials which yield the conclusion, without knowing the 

 conclusion itself. No one will deny this possibility unless he 

 fails to distinguish between the objective reality itself, the ob 

 jective things, facts, events, on the one hand, and the mind s 

 subjective insight into them, on the other. In the objective 

 reality itself, the truth of the conclusion is simultaneous with, and 

 just as actual as, the truth of the premisses ; all the truth which 

 the mind can gather about the objective reality is there in it, 

 whether the mind gathers it or not ; the facts are all there 

 together : but they need not, therefore, be all known together : 

 our mental insight into the whole objective reality may be, and 

 is, only partial ; and it can therefore grow, and does grow, by 

 our analysing, examining, modifying, the partial knowledge, the 

 undeveloped materials concepts and judgments, which our 

 minds already possess. It is only the failure to grasp this easy 

 distinction between subjective knowledge and objective reality 

 that can have permitted some authors to deny the possibility 

 of our knowing the logical premisses of a conclusion without 

 knowing the conclusion itself. 1 



198. LOGICAL GROUNDS AND ULTIMATE SOURCES OF IN 

 FERRED CONCLUSIONS. Since we have admitted, with Mill (194), 

 that all our knowledge, and, therefore, all the conclusions of all 

 our syllogisms, have their ultimate origin in our knowledge of the 

 particular facts of sense experience, it may, perhaps, still be 

 1 Cf. VENN, op. cit., p. 375. 



