330 PSYCHOLOGY. 



•whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reason- 

 ing is productive. An empirical, or ' rule-of-thumb,' thinker 

 can deduce nothing from data with whose behavior and 

 associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar. But put a 

 reasoner amongst a set of concrete objects which he has 

 neither seen nor heard of before, and with a little time, if 

 he is a good reasoner, he will make such inferences from 

 them as will quite atone for his ignorance. Keasoning 

 helps us out of unprecedented situations — situations for 

 which all our common associative wisdom, all the 'educa- 

 tion ' which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us 

 without resource. 



Lei us make this ability to deal ivith novel data the tech- 

 nical differentia of reasoning. This will sufficiently mark 

 it out from common associative thinking, and will immedi- 

 ately enable us to say just what peculiarity it contains. 



It contains analysis and abstraction. Whereas the merely 

 empirical thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains 

 helpless, or gets ' stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or 

 similar, the reasoner breaks it up and notices some one of 

 its separate attributes. This attribute he takes to be the 

 essential part of the whole fact before him. This attribute 

 has properties or consequences which the fact until then 

 was not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed 

 to contain the attribute, it must have. 



Call the fact or concrete datum S ; 

 the essential attribute M ; 

 the attribute's property P. 



Then the reasoned inference of P from S cannot be 

 made without M's intermediation. The ' essence ' M is 

 thus that third or middle term in the reasoning which a 

 moment ago was pronounced essential. For his original 

 concrete S the reasoner substitutes its abstract property, 31. 

 What is true of M, w^hat is coupled with M, then holds 

 true of S, is coupled with S. As M is properly one of the 

 parts of the entire S, reasoning may then be very ivell defined 

 as the substitution of parts and tJieir implications or consequences 

 for wholes. And the art of the reasoner will consist of two 

 stages : 



