332 PSYCHOLOGY. 



— we see that the second or minor premise, the 'subsump- 

 tion ' as it is sometimes called, is the one requiring the sa- 

 gacity ; the first or major the one requiring the fertility, or 

 fulness of learning. Usually the learning is more apt to be 

 ready than the sagacity, the ability to seize fresh aspects 

 in concrete things, being rarer than the ability to learn old 

 rules ; so that, in most actual cases of reasoning, the minor 

 premise, or the way of conceiving the subject, is the one 

 that makes the novel step in thought. This is, to be sure, 

 not always the case ; for the fact that M carries P with it 

 may also be unfamiliar and now formulated for the first 

 time. 



The perception that S is M is a mode of conceiviiig S. 

 The statement that M is P is an abstract or general proposi- 

 tion. A word about both is necessary. 



WHAT IS MEANT BY A MODE OF CONCEIVING, 



When we conceive of S merely as M (of vermilion 

 merely as a mercury-compound, for example), we neglect 

 all the other attributes which it may have, and attend 

 exclusively to this one. We mutilate the fulness of 

 S's reality. Every reality has an infinity of aspects or 

 properties. Even so simple a fact as a line which you trace 

 in the air may be considered in respect to its form, its 

 length, its direction, and its location. When we reach 

 more complex facts, the number of ways in which we may 

 regard them is literally endless. Yermilion is not only a 

 mercury-compound, it is vividly red, heavy, and expensive, 

 it comes from China, and so on, in infinitum. All objects are 

 well-springs of properties, which are only little by little 

 developed to our knowledge, and it is truly said that to 

 know one thing thoroughly would be to know the whole 

 universe. Mediately or immediately, that one thing is re- 

 lated to everything else ; and to know all about it, all its 

 relations need be known. But each relation forms one of 

 its attributes, one angle by which some one may conceive it, 

 and while so conceiving it may ignore the rest of it. A man 

 is such a complex fact. But out of the complexity all that 

 an army commissary picks out as important for his purposes 

 is his property of eating so many pounds a day ; the genera!, 



