434 



OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



II 



and as such take the strongest hold 

 on the mind, and of all other impres- 

 sions can be most easily recalled and 

 retained in view. They therefore 

 serve to give a point of attachment to 

 all the more volatile objects of thought 

 and feeling. Impressions that when 

 passed might be dissipated for ever 

 are, by their connection with lan- 

 guage, always within reach. Thoughts, 

 of themselves, 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 m,oment. Words are the cus- 

 todiers of every product of mind less 

 impressive than themselves. All ex- 

 tensions of human knowledge, all new 

 generalisations, are fixed and spread, 

 even unintentionally, by the use of 

 words. The child growing up learns, 

 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 grow up teaches us all 

 the common philosophy of the age. It 

 directs us to observe 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 bygone genera- 

 tions admits) with the objects to 

 which they bear the greatest total re- 

 semblance. 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 

 birthright 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 investi- 

 gation of truth ; in other words, to 

 the process of induction. 



§ 2. Observation and Abstraction, 

 the operations which formed the sub- 

 ject of the two foregoing chapters, 

 are conditions indispensable to induc- 

 tion ; there can be no induction where 



they are not. It has been imagined 

 that Naming is also a condition 

 equally indispensable. There are 

 thinkers who have held that lan- 

 guage is not solely, according to a 

 phrase generally current, an instru- 

 ment of thought, but the instrument ; 

 that names, or something equivalent 

 to them, some species of artificial 

 signs, are necessary to reasoning ; 

 that there could be no inference, 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 truth. ]f 

 reasoning be from particulars to par- 

 ticulars, and if it consist in recognis- 

 ing one fact as a mark of another, or 

 a mark of a mark of another, nothing 

 is required to render reasoning pos- 

 sible, 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 recognise as having 

 taken place, or as about to take 

 place, that of which we have per- 

 ceived a mark, there is evidently no 

 need of language. And this inference 

 of one particular fact from another is 

 a case of induction. It is of this sort 

 of induction that brutes .nre capable ; 

 it is in this shape that \;:)cnltivated 



* Tliis sentence having been cv.Ancously 

 understood as if I had meant to assert tliat 

 belief is nothing but an irresistiijle associa- 

 tion, I think it necessary to observe that I 

 express no theory respecting tlie nllimnte 

 analysis either of reasoning or of 1 .li. •', 

 two of the most obscure points in .-naly- 

 tical psychology. I am speaking )l•^t of 

 the powers themselves, but of the j rovi- 

 ous conditions necessary to enable those 

 powers to exert themselves ; of which 

 conditions I am contending that langu.age 

 is not one, senses and association being 

 sufficient without it. The irresistible- 

 nssociation theory of belief, and the diflTi- 

 culties connected with the subject, have 

 been discussed at length in the notes to 

 the new edition of Mr. James Mill's 

 Analysis of the phenomena of the Human 

 Mind, 



