398 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



hold on the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily re- 

 called and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of 

 attachment to all the moi'e volatile objects of thought and feeling. 

 Impressions, that when past might be dissipated for ever, are, by their 

 connexion with language, always within reach. Thoughts, of them- 

 selves, are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental 

 vision ; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it restores 

 them in a moment. Words are the custodiers of every product of 

 mind less impressive than themselves. All extensions of human knowl- 

 edo-e, all new generalizations, are fixed and spread, even uninten- 

 tionally, by the use of words. The child growing up leanis, along 

 with the vocables of his mother-tongue, that things which he would 

 have believed to be different, are, in important points, the same. 

 Without any formal instruction, the language in which we gi'ow up 

 teaches us all the common philosophy of the age. It directs us to ob- 

 serve and know things which we should have overlooked ; it supplies 

 us with classifications ready made, by which things are arranged (as 

 far as the light of by-gone generations admits) with the objects to 

 which they bear the greatest total resemblance. The number of 

 general names in a language, and the degree of generality of those 

 names, afford a test of the knowledge of the era, and of the intellectual 

 insight which is the birth-right 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 investigation of truth ; in other 

 words, to the process of induction. 



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

 subject of the two foregoing chapters, are conditions indispensable to 

 induction : there can be no induction where they are not. It has been 

 imagined that Naming is also a condition equally indispensable. There 

 are philosophers who have held that language is not solely, according 

 to a phrase generally cuiTent, an instrument of thought, but the instru- 

 ment : that names, or something equivalent to them, some species of 

 artificial signs, are necessary to reasoning ; that there could be no in- 

 ference, 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 exaggeration, though 

 of an important tmth. 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 up 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 oi lan- 

 guage. And this inference of one particular fact fi-om another is a 

 case of induction. It is of this sort of induction that brutes are capable ; 

 it is in this shape that uncultivated minds make almost all their induc- 

 tions, and that we all do so in the cases in which familiar experience 

 forces our conclusions upon us without any active process of inquiry 

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



