124 



REASONING. 



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 corresponding general propositions. 

 An old warrior, on a rapid glance at 

 the outlines of the ground, is able at 

 once to give the necessary orders for 

 a skilful arrangement of his troops ; 

 though if he has received little theo- 

 retical instruction, and has seldom 

 been called upon to answer to other 

 people for his conduct, he may never 

 have had in his mind a single general 

 theorem respecting the relation be- 

 tween ground and array. But his 

 experience of encampments, in cir- 

 cumstances more or less similar, has 

 left a number of vivid, unexpressed, 

 ungeneralised analogies in his mind, 

 the most appropriate of which, in- 

 stantly 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 manner 

 most suited to his purpose, under the 

 operation of all the conditions neces- 

 sarily involved, the weight and form 

 of the weapon, the direction and dis- 

 tance of the object, the action of the 

 wind, &c., owes this power to a long 

 series of previous experiments, the 

 results of which he certainly never 

 framed into any verbal theorems or 

 rules. The same thing may generally 

 be said of any other extraordinary 

 manual dexterity. Not long ago a 

 Scotch manufacturer procured from 

 England, at a high rate of wages, a 

 working dyer, famous for producing 

 very fine colours, with the view of 

 teaching to his other workmen the 

 same skill. The workman came ; but 

 his mode of proportioning the ingredi- 

 ents, in which lay the secret of the 

 effects he produced, was by taking 

 them up in handfuls, while the com- 

 mon method was to weigh them. The 

 manufacturer sought to make him 

 turn his handling system into an equi- 



valent weighing system, that the 

 general principle of his peculiar mode 

 of proceeding might be ascertained. 

 This, however, the man found himself 

 quite unable to do, and therefore could 

 impart his skill to nobody. He had, 

 from the individual cases of his own 

 experience, established a connection 

 in his mind between fine effects of 

 colour, and tactual perceptions in 

 handling his dyeing materials ; and 

 from these perceptions he could, in 

 any particular case, infer the means 

 to be employed, and the effects which 

 would be produced, but could not put 

 others in possession of the grounds on 

 which he proceeded, from having 

 never generalised them in his own 

 mind, or expressed them in language. 

 Almost every one knows Lord 

 Mansfield's advice to a man of practi- 

 cal good sense, who, being appointed 

 governor of a colony, had to preside 

 in its court of justice, without pre- 

 vious judicial practice or legal educa- 

 tion. The advice was to give his 

 decision boldly, for it would probably 

 be right ; but never to venture on 

 assigning reasons, for they would 

 almost infallibly be wrong. In cases 

 like this, which are of no uncommon 

 occurrence, it would be absurd to 

 suppose that the bad reason was the 

 source of the good decision. Lord 

 Mansfield knew that if any reason 

 were assigned it would be necessarily 

 an afterthought, the judge being in 

 fact guided by impressions from past 

 experience, without the circuitous pro- 

 cess of framing general principles 

 from them, and that if he attempted 

 to frame any such he would assuredly 

 fail. Lord Mansfield, however, would 

 not have doubted that a man of equal 

 experience who had also a mind stored 

 with general propositions derived by 

 legitimate induction from that experi- 

 ence, would have been greatly prefer- 

 able as a judge to one, however saga- 

 cious, who could not be trusted with 

 the explanation and justification of 

 his own judgments. The cases of 

 men of talent performing wonderful 

 things they know not how, are ex- 



