410 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



which the mind ruiis on by fresh associations to another set of ideas, 

 without waiting for the suggestion of the remainder of the complex 

 cluster. If this were not the case, our processes of thought could not 

 take place with anything like the rapidity which we know they possess. 

 Very often, indeed, \yhen we are employing a word in our mental 

 operations, we are so far from waiting until the complex idea which 

 corresponds to the meaning of the word is consciously brought before 

 us in all its parts, that we run on to new trains of ideas by the other 

 associations which the mere word excites, without having realized in 

 our imagination any pait. whatever of the meaning : thus using the 

 word, and even' using it well and accurately, and carrying on impor- 

 tant processes of reasoning by means of it, in an almost mechanical 

 manner: so much so, that some philosophers, generalizing fi'om an 

 extreme case, have fancied that «ZZ reasoning is but the mechanical 

 use of a set of terms according to a certain form. We may discuss 

 and settle the most important interests of towns or nations, by the 

 application of general theorems or practical maxims previously laid 

 down, without having had consciously suggested to us, once in the 

 whole process, the houses and green fields, the thronged market- 

 places and domestic hearths, of which not only those towns and nations 

 consist, but which the words town and nation confessedly mean. 



Since, then, general names come in this manner to be used (and 

 even to do a portion of their work well) without suggesting to the 

 mind the whole of their meaning, and often with the suggestion of a 

 very small, or no part at all of that meaning ; we cannot wonder that 

 words so used come in time to be no longer capable of suggesting any 

 other of the ideas appropriated to them, than those with which the 

 association is most immediate and strongest, or most kept up by the 

 incidents of life : the remainder being lost altogether ; unless the 

 mind, by often consciously dwelling upon them, keeps up the associa- 

 tion. Words naturally retain much more of their meaning to persons 

 of active imagination, who habitually represent to themselves things in 

 the concrete, with the detail which belongs to them in the actual world. 

 To minds of a different description, the only antidote to this corruption 

 of language is predicg-tion. The habit of predicating of the name, all 

 the various properties which it originally connoted, keeps up the asso- 

 ciation between the name and those properties. 



But in order, that it may do so, it is necessary that the predicates 

 should themselves retain their association with the properties which 

 they severally connote. For the propositions cannot keep the mean- 

 ing of the words alive, if the meaning of the propositions themselves 

 should die. And nothing is more common than for propositions to be 

 mechanically repeated, mechanically retained in the memory, and 

 their truth entirely assented to and relied upon, while yet they carry 

 no meaning distinctly home to the mind; and while the matter of fact 

 or law of nature which they originally expressed, is as much lost sight 

 of, and practically disregarded, as if it never had been heard of at all. 

 In those subjects which are at the same time familiar and complicated, 

 and especially in those which are so much of both these things as moral 

 and social subjects are, it is matter of common remark how many im- 

 portant propositions are believed and repeated from habit, while no 

 account could be given, and no sense is practically manifested, of the 

 truths which they convey. Hence it is, that the traditional maxims of 



