FUNCTIONS AND VALUE OF THE SYLLOGISM. I43 



finger into the flame of it, he will be burned again. He believes this in ev- 

 ery case which happens to arise ; but without looking, in each instance, be- 

 yond the present case. He is not generalizing; he is inferring a partic- 

 ular from particulars. In the same way, also, brutes reason. There is 

 no ground for attributing to any of the lower animals the use of signs, of 

 such a nature as to render general propositions possible. But those ani- 

 mals profit by experience, and avoid what they have found to cause them 

 pain, in the same manner, though not always with the same skill, as a 

 human creature. Not only the burned child, but the burned dog, dreads 

 the fire. 



I believe that, in point of fact, when drawing inferences from our per- 

 sonal experience, and not from maxims handed down to us by books or 

 tradition, we much oftener conclude from particulars to particulars directly, 

 than through the intermediate agency of any general proposition. We are 

 constantly reasoning from ourselves to other people, or from one person to 

 another, without giving ourselves the trouble to erect our observations into 

 general maxims of human or external nature. When we conclude that some 

 person will, on some given occasion, feel or act so and so, we sometimes 

 judge from an enlarged consideration of the manner in which human beings 

 in general, or persons of some particular character, are accustomed to feel 

 and act ; but much oftener from merely recollecting the feelings and con- 

 duct of the same person in some previous instance, or from considering 

 how we should feel or act ourselves. It is not only the village matron, 

 who, when called to a consultation upon the case of a neighbor's child, pro- 

 nounces on the evil and its remedy simply on the recollection and authority 

 of what she accounts the similar case of her Lucy. We all, where we have 

 no definite maxims to steer by, guide- ourselves in the same way : and if we 

 have an extensive experience, and retain its impressions strongly, we may 

 acquire in this manner a very considerable power of accurate judgment, 

 which we may be utterly incapable of justifying or of communicating to 

 others. Among the higher order of practical intellects there have been 

 many of whom it was remarked how admirably they suited their means to 

 their ends, without being able to give any sufiicient reasons for what they 

 did ; and applied, or seemed to apply, recondite principles which they were 

 wholly unable to state. This is a natural consequence of having a mind 

 stored with appropriate particulars, and having been long accustomed to 

 reason at once from these to fresh particulars, without practicing the habit 

 of stating to one's self or to others the corresponding general propositions. 

 An old warrior, on a rapid glance at the outlines of the ground, is able at 

 once to give the necessary orders for a skillful arrangement of his troops ; 

 though if he has received little theoretical instruction, and has seldom been 

 called upon to answer to other people for his conduct, he may never have 

 had in his mind a single general theorem respecting the relation between 

 ground and array. But his experience of encampments, in circumstances 

 more or less similar, has left a number of vivid, unexpressed, ungeneralized 

 analogies in his mind, the most appropriate of which, instantly suggesting 

 itself, determines him to a judicious arrangement. 



The skill of an uneducated person in the use of weapons, or of tools, is 

 of a precisely similar nature. The savage who executes unerringly the ex- 

 act throw which brings down his game, or his enemy, in the manner most 

 suited to his purpose, under the operation of all the conditions necessarily 

 involved, the weight and form of the weapon, the direction and distance of 

 the object, the action of the wind, etc., owes this power to a long series of 



