546 FALLACIES. 



judgment, and, as it turned out, a false inference, should not have opened 

 the eyes of the bigots of common sense, and inspired them with a more 

 modest distrust of the competency of mere ignorance to judge the conclu- 

 sions of cultivated thought. 



In proportion to any person's deficiency of knowledge and mental culti- 

 vation is, generally, his inability to discriminate between his inferences and 

 the perceptions on which they were grounded. Many a marvelous tale, 

 many a scandalous anecdote, owes its origin to this incapacity. The nar- 

 rator relates, not what he saw or heard, but the impression which lie de- 

 rived from what he saw or heard, and of which perhaps the greater part 

 consisted of inference, though the whole is related not as inference but as 

 matter of fact. The difficulty of inducing witnesses to restrain within any 

 moderate limits the intermixture of their inferences with the narrative of 

 their perceptions, is well known to experienced cross-examiners; and still 

 more is this the case when ignorant persons attempt to describe any natu- 

 ral phenomenon. " The simplest narrative," says Dugald Stewart,* *' of 

 the most illiterate observer involves more or less of hypothesis ; nay, in 

 general, it will be found that, in proportion to his ignorance, the greater is 

 the number of conjectural principles involved in his statements. A village 

 apothecary (and, if possible, in a still greater degree, an experienced nurse) 

 is seldom able to describe the plainest case, without employing a phraseol- 

 ogy of which every word is a theory: whereas a simple and genuine speci- 

 fication of the phenomena which mark a particular disease ; a specification 

 unsophisticated by fancy, or by preconceived opinions, may be regarded as 

 unequivocal evidence of a mind trained by long and successful study to the 

 most difficult of all arts, that of the faithful interpretation of nature." 



The universality of the confusion between perceptions and the inferences 

 drawn from them, and the rarity of the power to discriminate the one from 

 the other, ceases to surprise us when we consider that in the far greater 

 number of instances the actual perceptions of our senses are of no impor- 

 tance or interest to us except as marks from which we infer something be- 

 yond them. It is not the color and superficial extension perceived by the 

 eye that are important to us, but the object, of which those visible appear- 

 ances testify the presence ; and where the sensation itself is indifferent, as 

 it generally is, we have no motive to attend particularly to it, but acquire a 

 habit of passing it over without distinct consciousness, and going on at 

 once to the inference. So that to know what the sensation actually was, is 

 a study in itself, to 'which painters, for example, have to train themselves 

 by special and long-coxitinued discipline and application. In things farther 

 removed from the dominion of the outward senses, no one who has not 

 great experience in pyschological analysis is competent to break this in- 

 tense association ; and when such analytic habits do not exist in the requi- 

 site degree, it is hardly possible to mention any of the habitual judgments 

 of mankind on subjects of a high degree of abstraction, from the being of 

 a God and the immortality of the soul down to the multiplication table, 

 which are not, or have not been, considered as matter of direct intuition. 

 So strong is the tendency to ascribe an intuitive character to judgments 

 which are mere inferences, and often false ones. No one can doubt that 

 many a deluded visionary has actually believed that he was directly in- 

 spired from Heaven, and that the Almighty had conversed with him face 

 to face ; which yet was only, on his part, a conclusion drawn from appeal'- 



* Elements of the Philosophy of the Mind, vol. ii., chap. 4, sect. 5. 



