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BIGELOW. 
case out of two or three which may occur, and proceeds to de¬ 
stroy that as if it really were the author’s conception. 
Then there is the other kind of critic just mentioned, the 
man who is really ignorant and yet makes his copy by writ¬ 
ing something in general terms, or else in an entirely incor¬ 
rect manner, about another man’s production. Such men 
are not mathematicians, they are not philosophers; they may 
be general readers, but they do not possess the critical faculty 
of seeing things exactly as the}" are. We might spend our 
time in enlarging upon these faulty styles of criticism, and 
they would make very interesting reading, though perhaps 
too personal for comfort, but we hasten onwards to some 
exposition of that just, genuine, and noble criticism whose 
application to the advancement of science it is a pleasure to 
facilitate in every possible way. 
We may arrive at a definition of the logical process of 
criticism, philosophically considered, by referring to the 
principle of identity—A is A, or A is not B. This is the 
ground of the intellectual process of judgment. Having 
prepared two or more concepts, through sense-perception or 
intuition, the mind advances by comparison, and the idea 
of identity or non-identity, to a judgment or affirmative propo¬ 
sition ; out of a group of such identity judgments w'e possess 
the faculty to generalize these primary elements into laws 
and universal ideas, which are the final products of human 
intelligence. Concept, judgment, general law-—these are 
the three stages in the gradual construction of knowledge. 
Now, criticism is essentially the exercise of the faculty of 
knowing in all these three stages, but especially it is that 
of judgment, which holds the central transitional place. 
We must know that the objects of knowledge are true and 
not false; we must group these objects by similarities and 
identities; we must perceive the features common to these 
groups in order to construct laws and theorems. Theories 
are the tentative and probable forecasts of the laws which 
may embrace many groups of identity judgments, and it is 
the dream of the human mind to rise at last to the central 
