126 REASONING. 



books or tradition, We'much oftener conclude from particulars to par- 

 ticulars directly, than tJirough 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 obsei-vations 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 men in general, or men 

 of some paiticular character, are accustomed to feel and act ; but 

 much oftener from having known the feelings and conduct of the same 

 man in some previous instance, or from considering how we should 

 feel or act oui'selves. It is not only the village matron who, when 

 called to a consultation upon the case of a neighbor's child, pronoun- 

 ces on the evil and its I'emedy 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 impres- 

 sions 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 sufficient reasons for what they did ; and applied, or 

 seemed to apply, recondite principles which they were wholly unable 

 to state. Tliis 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 practising the 

 habit of stating to oneself or to others the coiTesponding general prop- 

 ositions. An old waiTior, on a rapid glance at the .outlines of the 

 ground, is able at once to give the necessary orders for a skillful ar- 

 rangement of his troops ; though if he has received little theoretical 

 instruction, and has seldom been called upon to answer toother people 

 for his conduct, he may never have had in his mind a single general 

 theorem i-especting the relation between ground and array. But his 

 experience of encampments, under circumstances more or less similar, 

 has left a numbesr 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 exact throw which brings down his game, or his enemy, in the man- 

 ner most suited to his purpose, under the operation of all tlie conditions 

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

 and distance of the object, the action of the wind, &c., owes this power 

 to a long series of previous experiments, the results of which he cer- 

 tainly never framed into any verbal theorems or rules. It is the same 

 in all extraordinary manual dexterity. Not long ago a Scotch manufac- 

 turer procured from England, at a high rate of wages, a working dyer, 

 famous for producing very fine colors, with the view of teaching to his 

 other workmen the same skill. The workman came ; but his mode of 

 proportioning the ingredients, in which lay the secret of the effects he 

 produced, was by talcing them up in handflils, while the common method 

 was to weigh them. The manufacturer sought to make him turn liis 



