FUNCTIONS AND VALUE OF THE SYLLOGISM. 211 



pose that the bad reason was the source of the good decision. 

 Lord Mansfield knew that if any reason were assigned it 

 would be necessarily an afterthought, the judge being in fact 

 guided by impressions from past experience, without the 

 circuitous process of framing general principles from them, 

 and that if he attempted to frame any such he would 

 assuredly fail. Lord Mansfield, however, would not have 

 doubted that a man of equal experience who had also a 

 mind stored with general propositions derived by legitimate 

 induction from that experience, would have been greatly pre- 

 ferable as a judge, to one, however sagacious, who could not 

 be trusted with the explanation and justification of his own 

 judgments. The cases of men of talent performing wonderful 

 things they know not how, are examples of the rudest and 

 most spontaneous form of the operations of superior minds. 

 It is a defect in them, and often a source of errors, not to 

 have generalized as they went on ; but generalization, though 

 a help, the most important indeed of all helps, is not an 

 essential. 



Even the scientifically instructed, who possess, in the form 

 of general propositions, a systematic record of the results of the 

 experience of mankind, need not always revert to those general 

 propositions in order to apply that experience to a new case. 

 It is justly remarked by Dugald Stewart, that though the 

 reasonings in mathematics depend entirely on the axioms, it is 

 by no means necessary to our seeing the conclusiveness of the 

 proof, that the axioms should be expressly adverted to. When 

 it is inferred that AB is equal to CD because each of them is 

 equal to EF, the most uncultivated understanding, as soon as 

 the propositions were understood, would assent to the in- 

 ference, without having ever heard of the general truth that 

 " things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one 

 another." This remark of Stewart, consistently followed out, 

 goes to the root, as I conceive, of the philosophy of ratiocina- 

 tion ; and it is to be regretted that he himself stopt short 

 at a much more limited application of it. He saw that the 

 general propositions on which a reasoning is said to depend, 

 may, in certain cases, be altogether omitted, without impairing 



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