NAMING. 397 



ourselves in a sufficiently commantline; position, and cast our eyes 

 round us, and if we can see the object, it is well ; if not, we ask our- 

 selves mentally what are the places in which it may be hid, in order 

 that we may there search for it : and so on, until we imagine the place 

 where it really is. And here too we nujuire to have had a previous 

 conception, or knowledge, of those different places. As in this fa- 

 miliar process, so in the philosophical operation which it illustrates, 

 we first endeavor to find the lost object or recognize the common 

 atti'ibute, without conjecturally invoking the aid of any pr-eviously 

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

 failed in this, we call upon our nnagination 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 bbservation and comparison. It must be a mind stored 

 with general conceptions, previously acquired, of the sorts ^vhich bear 

 affinity to the subject of the particular inquiry. And much will also 

 depend upon the natural strength and acquired culture of what has 

 been tenned the scientific imagination ; upon the faculty possessed of 

 mentally arranging known elements into new combinations such as 

 have not yet been observed in nature, though not contradictory to any 

 known laws. 



But the variety of intellectual habits, the purposes which they sei-ve, 

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

 siderations belonging to the Art of Education : a subject far wider 

 than Logic, and which the present treatise does not profess to discuss. 

 Here, therefore, the present chapter may properly close. It constitutes 

 a real digi'ession from the main purpose of this work ; to which no- 

 thing would have tempted me but the apparent necessity, in promul- 

 gating a view of induction opposed to that which is taught by an 

 eminent living wi'iter, of not shrinking from an encounter with him on 

 his own ground, but entering sufficiently into the spirit of his views 

 to show how much of the difference is apparent and how much real; 

 what is the equivalent expression for his doctrines in my own language ; 

 and what are the reasons which lead me, even where the opinions are 

 similar, to adopt a different mode of statement. 



CHAPTER III. 



OF NAMING, AS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



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

 importance of language as a medium of human intercourse, whether 

 for puqioses of sympathy or information. Nor does our design admit 

 of more than a passing allusion to that groat property of names, upon 

 which their functions as an intellectual instrument are, in reality, ulti- 

 mately dependent ; their potency as a means of forming, and of rivet- 

 ing, 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 



