464 OPEKATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



recognize the common attribute, without conjecturally invoking the aid of 

 any previously acquired conception, or, in other words, of any hypothesis. 

 Having failed in this, we call upon our imagination for some hypothesis of 

 a possible place, or a possible point of resemblance, and then look to see 

 whether the facts agree with the conjecture. 



For such cases something more is required than a mind accustomed to 

 accurate observation and comparison. It must be a mind stoi'ed with gen- 

 eral conceptions, previously acquired, of the sorts which bear affinity to the 

 subject of the particular inquiry. And much will also depend on the nat- 

 ural strength and acquired culture of what has been termed the scientific 

 imagination ; on the faculty possessed of mentally arranging known ele- 

 ments into new combinations, such as have not yet been observed in na- 

 ture, though not contradictory to any known laws. 



But the variety of intellectual habits, the purposes which they serve, and 

 the modes in which they may be fostered and cultivated, are considerations 

 belonging to the Art of Education : a subject far wider than Logic, and 

 which this treatise does not profess to discuss. Here, therefore, the pres- 

 ent chapter may properly close. 



CHAPTER III. 



OF NAMING, AS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



§ 1. It does not belong to the present undertaking to dwell on the im- 

 portance of language as a medium of human intercourse, whether for pur- 

 poses of sympathy or of information. Nor does our design admit of more 

 than a passing allusion to that great property of names, on which their func- 

 tions as an intellectual instrument are, in reality, ultimately dependent; 

 their potency as a means of forming, and of riveting, associations among 

 our other ideas ; a subject on which an able thinker* has thus written : 



" Names are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold on 

 the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and re- 

 tained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all 

 the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when 

 passed might be dissipated forever, are, by their connection with language, 

 always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves, are perpetually slipping out 

 of the field of immediate mental vision ; but the name abides with us, and 

 the utterance of it restores them in a moment. Words are the custodiers 

 of every product of mind less impressive than themselves. All extensions 

 of human knowledge, all new generalizations, are fixed and spread, even un- 

 intentionally, by the use of words. The child growing up learns, along 

 with the vocables of his mother-tongue, that things which he would have 

 believed to be different are, in important points, the same. Without any 

 formal instruction, the language in which we grow up teaches us all the 

 common philosophy of the age. It directs us to observe and know things 

 which we should have overlooked ; it supplies us with classifications ready 

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

 tions admits) with the objects to which they bear the greatest total resem- 

 blance. The number of general names in a language, and the degree of 



* Professor Bain. 



