REASONING DOES NOT CREATE NEW TRUTHS. 341 



latent potential state in our antecedent knowledge. It 

 further shows, that although we evolve new ideas by reason- 

 ing upon the facts of nature, we cannot, by means of study 

 and inference alone, evolve an unlimited number of new 

 truths (or even of hypotheses) from a limited amount of 

 actual knowledge, because the number of inclusives (al- 

 though very extensive) in a limited number of ideas are 

 themselves limited ; and more especially because the human 

 mind can only imagine each truth in a very small number of 

 aspects. We can draw more inferences from a statement, 

 the essential ideas of which we are acquainted with, than 

 from the same statement, if we do not know those ideas ; and 

 the number of aspects, therefore, in which we can view a 

 single statement depends upon the extent of our experience 

 and knowledge, and increases also with the development 

 of science, because every newly-developed truth throws 

 additional light upon many other previously known ones. 



Different scientific propositions contain different quan- 

 tities of meaning ; this is proved by the fact that we can 

 evolve from them different amounts of knowledge by 

 means of analysis and inference. The actual amount of 

 knowledge which can be extracted from any given state- 

 ment varies with the degree of generality of the proposi- 

 tion ; the more general the proposition, the greater the 

 quantity of knowledge implicitly contained in it; for 

 instance, a greater number of inferences, and inferences 

 of greater importance, can be drawn from the statement 

 c all metals are some heat-conductors,' than from the one 

 ' all copper articles are some heat-conductors,' because the 

 former possesses greater extension of meaning, and be- 

 cause it admits of a much greater number of divisions 

 and sub-divisions, as well as a very much greater number 

 of permutations of ideas, than the latter. 



The general method of discovering new. truths in 



