342 PSYCHOLOGY. 



evident and obvious than those of entire phenomena ? For 

 two reasons. 



First, the extracted characters are more general than 

 the concretes, and the connections they may have are, 

 therefore, more familiar to iis, having been more often 

 met in our experience. Think of heat as motion, and what- 

 ever is true of motion will be true of heat ; but we have had 

 a hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat. 

 Think of the rays passing through this lens as bending 

 towards the perpendicular, and you substitute for the com- 

 paratively' unfamiliar lens the ver^^ familiar notion of a par- 

 ticular change in direction of a line, of which notion every 

 day brings us countless examples. 



The other reason why the relations of the extracted 

 characters are so evident is that their properties are so 

 few, compared with the properties of the whole, from which 

 we derived them. In every concrete total the characters 

 and their consequences are so inexhaustibly numerous 

 that we may lose our way among them before noticing 

 the particular consequence it behooves us to draw. But, 

 if we are lucky enough to single out the proper character, 

 we take in, as it were, by a single glance all its possible 

 consequences. Thus the character of scraping the sill 

 has very few suggestions, prominent among which is the 

 suggestion that the scraping will cease if we raise the door ; 

 whilst the entire refractory door suggests an enormous num- 

 ber of notions to the mind. 



Take another example. I am sitting in a railroad-car, 

 waiting for the train to start. It is winter, and the stove 

 fills the car with pungent smoke. The brakeman enters, 

 and my neighbor asks him to " stop that stove smoking." 

 He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as the car begins 

 to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It ahoays 

 does," replies the brakeman. It is evident from this 

 ' always ' that the connection between car mo\dng and 

 smoke stopping was a purely empirical one in the brake- 

 man's mind, bred of habit. But, if the passenger had been 

 an acute reasoner, he, with no experience of what that stove 

 always did, might have anticipated the brakeman's reply, 

 and spared his own question. Had he singled out of all the 



