NAMING. 465 



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 invcntigation of truth; in other words, to the 

 process of induction. 



§ 2. Observation and Abstraction, the operations which formed the sub- 

 ject of the two foregoing chapters, are conditions indispensable to induc- 

 tion ; 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 some- 

 thing equivalent to them, some species of artificial signs, are necessary to 

 reasoning; that there could be no inference, and consequently no induction, 

 without them. But if the nature of reasoning was correctly explained in 

 the earlier part of the present work, this opinion must be held to be an ex- 

 aggeration, though of an important truth. If reasoning be from particulars 

 to particulars, and if it consist in recognizing 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 

 uu the idea of the other,* For these mental phenomena, as well as for the 

 belief or expectation which follows, and by which we recognize as having 

 taken place, or as about to take place, that of which we have perceived a 

 mark, there is evidently no need of language. And this inference of one 

 particular fact from another is a case of induction. It is of this sort of in- 

 duction that brutes are capable; it is in this shape that uncultivated minds 

 make almost all their inductions, and that we all do so in the cases in which 

 familiar experience forces our conclusions upon us without any active proc- 

 ess of inquiry on our part, and in which the belief or expectation follows 

 the suggestion of the evidence with the promptitude and certainty of an 

 instinct.f 



§ 3. But though inference of an inductive character is possible without 

 the use of signs, it could never, without them, be carried much beyond the 

 very simple cases which we have just described, and which form, in all 

 probability, the limit of the reasonings of those animals to whom conven- 

 tional language is unknown. Without language, or something equivalent 

 to it, there could only be as much reasoning from experience as can take 

 place without the aid of general propositions. Now, though in strictness 



* This sentence having been eiToneously 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 theoiy 

 respecting the ultimate analysis either of reasoning or of belief, two of the most obscure points 

 in analytical psychology. I am speaking not of the powers themselves, but of the previous 

 conditions necessary to enable those powers to exert themselves : of which conditions I am 

 contending that language is not one, senses and association being sufficient Avithout it. The 

 irresistible association theory of belief, and the difficulties connected with the subject, have 

 been discussed at length in the notes to the new edition of Mr. James Mill's Analysis of the 

 Phenomena of the Human Mind. 



t Mr. Bailey agrees with me in thinking that whenever "from something actually present 

 to my senses, conjoined with past experience, I feel satisfied that something has happened, or 

 will happen, or is happening, beyond the sphere of my personal observation," I n^gy wit^i^strict 

 propriety be said to reason : and of course to reason inductively, for demons 

 is excluded by the cii-cumstances of the case. ( The Theory of Reasoning, 



30 



