REASONING. 329 



he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and 

 the other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able 

 to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them 

 both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of loco- 

 motion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he thus 

 raises his recepts into concepts ; but . . . for many other purposes it is 

 of the highest iniportanco that he is able to do this." * 



IN REASONING, WE PICK OUT ESSENTIAL QUALITIES. 



The chief of these purposes is predication, a theoretic 

 function which, though it always leads eventually to some 

 kind of action, yet tends as often as not to inhibit the imme- 

 diate motor response to which the simple inferences of 

 which we have been speaking give rise. In reasoning, A 

 may suggest B ; but B, instead of being an idea which is 

 simply obeyed by us, is an idea which suggests the distinct 

 additional idea C. And where the train of suggestion is one 

 of reasoning distinctively so called as contrasted with mere 

 revery or ' associative ' sequence, the ideas bear certain 

 inward relations to each other which we must proceed to 

 examine with some care. 



The result C yielded by a true act of reasoning is apt 

 to be a thing voluntarily sought, such as the means to a 

 proposed end, the ground for an observed effect, or the 

 effect of an assumed cause. All these results may be 

 thought of as concrete things, but they are not suggested im- 

 mediately by other concrete things, as in the trains of simply as- 

 sociative thought. They are linked to the concretes which 

 precede them by intermediate steps, and these steps are 

 formed by general characters articulately denoted and ex- 

 pressly analyzed out. A thing inferred by reasoning need 

 neither have been an habitual associate of the datum from 

 which we infer it, nor need it be similar to it. It may be 

 a thing entirely unknown to our previous experience, some- 

 thing which no simple association of concretes could ever 

 have evoked. The great difference, in fact, between that 

 simpler kind of rational thinking which consists in the con- 

 crete objects of past experience merely suggesting each 

 other, and reasoning distinctively so called, is this, that 



* Loc. cit. p. 74. 



