124 REASONING. 



the consequences of an admission into which a man has been entrapped 

 without having considered and understood its full force. When yoti 

 admitted the major premiss, you asserted the conclusion; but, says 

 Archbishop Whately, you asserted it by implication merely : this, 

 however, can here only mean that you asserted it unconsciously ; that 

 you did not kuow you were asserting it ; but, if so, the difficulty re- 

 vives in this shape — Ought you not to have known ] Were you war- 

 ranted in asserting the general proposition without having satisfied 

 yourself of the truth of eveiything which it fairly includes 1 And if 

 not, what then is the syllogistic art but a contiivance for catching you 

 in a trap, and holding you fast in it 1 



§ 3. From this difficulty there appears to be but one issue. The 

 proposition, that the Duke of Wellington is mortal, is e\idently an in- 

 ference ; it is got at as a conclusion fi'om something else ; but do we, in 

 reality, conclude it from the proposition, All men are mortal ? I an- 

 swer, no. 



The eiTor committed is, I conceive, that of overlooking the distinc- 

 tion between the two parts of the process of philosophizing, the infer- 

 ring part, and the registering part ; and ascribing to the latter the 

 functions of the former. The mistake is that of refen'ing a man to his 

 own notes for the origin of his knowledge. If a man is asked a ques- 

 tion, and is at the moment unable to answer it, he may refi-esh his 

 memory by turning to a memorandum which he cames about A\dth 

 him. But if he were asked, how the fact came to his knowledge, he 

 would scarcely answer, because it was set down in his note-book : 

 unless the book was A\Titten, like the Koran, with a quill from the 

 wing of the angel Gabriel. 



Assuming that the proposition. The Duke of Wellington is mortal, 

 is immediately an inference from the proposition, All men are mortal ; 

 whence do we derive our knowledge of that general truth ] No super- 

 natiu'al aid being supposed, the answer must be, by observation. Now, 

 all which man can obsei-A'e are individual cases. From these all gen- 

 eral truths must be drawn, and into these they may be again resolved : 

 for a general truth is but an aggregate of particular truths ; a compre- 

 hensive expression, by which an indefinite number of individual facts 

 are affirmed or denied at once. But a general proposition is not 

 merely a compendious form for recording and preserving in the mem- 

 ory a number of pai'ticular facts, all of which have been observed. 

 Generalization is not a process of mere naming, it is also a process of 

 inference. From instances which we have observed, we feel warranted 

 in concluding, that what we found true in those instances, holds in all 

 similar ones, past, present, and future, however numerous they may be. 

 We then, by that valuable contrivance of language which enables us to 

 speak of many as if they were one, record all that we have observed, 

 together with all that we infer fi-om our observations, in one concise 

 expression; and have thus only one proposition, instead of an endless 

 number, to remember or to communicate. The results of many obser- 

 vations and inferences, and instructions for making innumerable infer- 

 ences in unforeseen cases, are compressed into one short sentence. 



^V^aen, therefore, we conclude from the death of John and Thomas, 

 and every other person we ever heard of in whose case the experi- 

 ment had been fairly tried, that the Duke of WeUington is mortal like 



