210 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



looked ; it supplies us with classifications ready made, by 

 which things are arranged (as far as the light of by-gone 

 generations admits) with the objects to which they bear 

 the greatest total resemblance. The number of general 

 names in a language, and the degree of generality of those 

 names, afford a test of the knowledge of the era, and of 

 the intellectual insight which is the birthright of any one 

 born into it." 



It is not, however, of the functions of Names, considered 

 generally, that we have here to treat, but only of the manner 

 and degree in which they are directly instrumental to the 

 investigation of truth; in other words, to the process of 

 induction. 



2. Observation and Abstraction, the operations which 

 formed the subject of the two foregoing chapters, are condi- 

 tions indispensable to induction ; there can be no induction 

 where they are not. It has been imagined that Naming is 

 also a condition equally indispensable. There are thinkers 

 who have held that language is not solely, according to a 

 phrase generally current, an instrument of thought, but the 

 instrument: that names, or something equivalent to them, 

 some species of artificial signs, are necessary to reasoning ; 

 that there could be no inference, and consequently no induc- 

 tion, without them. But if the nature of reasoning was cor- 

 rectly explained in the earlier part of the present work, this 

 opinion must be held to be an exaggeration, though of an 

 important truth. If reasoning be from particulars to par- 

 ticulars, and if it consist in recognising one fact as a mark of 

 another, or a mark of a mark of another, nothing is required 

 to render reasoning possible, except senses and association : 

 senses to perceive that two facts are conjoined ; association, as 

 the law by which one of those two facts raises up the idea of 

 the other.* For these mental phenomena, as well as for the 



* This sentence having been erroneously understood as if I had meant to 

 assert that belief is nothing but an irresistible association, I think it necessary 

 to observe that I express no theory respecting the ultimate analysis either of 

 reasoning or of belief, two of the most obscure points in analytical psychology. 



