A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive

ation. Nor does our design admit of more than a passing allusion to that great property of names, on which their functions as an intellectual instrument are, in reality,

and the utterance of it restores them in a moment. Words are the custodiers of every product of mind less impressive than themselves. All extensions of human knowledge, all new generalizations, are fixed and spread, even unintentionally, by the use of words. The child growing up learns, along with the vocables of his mother-tongue, that things which he would have believed to be different, are, in important points, the same. Without any formal instruction, the language in which we grow up teaches us all the

here to treat, but only of the manner and degree in which they are directly instru

reasoning was correctly explained in the earlier part of the present work, this opinion must be held to be an exaggeration, though of an important truth. If reasoning be from particulars to particulars, and if it consist in recognising one fact as a mark of another, or a mark of a mark of another, nothing is required to render reasoning possible, except senses and association: senses to perceive that two facts are conjoined; association, as the law by which one of those two facts raises up the idea of the other.[6] For these mental phenomena, as well as for the belief or expectation which follows, and by which we recog

ven fact, the second whether in the new case that mark exists, is natural, and scientifically indispensable. It is, indeed, in a majority of cases, rendered necessary by mere distance of time. The experience by which we are to guide our judgments may be other people's experience, little of which can be communicated to us otherwise than by language: when it is our own, it is generally experience long past; unless, therefore, it were recorded by means of artificial signs, little of it (except in cases involving our intenser sensations or emotions, or the subjects of our daily and hourly contemplation) would be retained in the memory. It is hardly necessary to add, that when the inductive inference is of any but the most direct and obvious nature-when it requires several observations or experiments, in varying circumstances, and the comparison of one of these with another-it

ome uniformity in the course of nature evolved and ascertained, since the existence of such an uniformity is required as a justification for drawing the inference in even a single case. This uniformity, therefore, may be ascertained once for all; and if, being ascertained, it can be remembered, it will serve as a formula for making, in particular cases, all such inferences as the previous experience will warrant. But we can o

es existing in nature; and should be hardly better off in respect to Induction than if we had no names at all. With none but names of individuals, (or in other words, proper names,) we might, by pronouncing the name, suggest the idea of the object, but we could not assert any proposition; except the unmeaning ones formed by predicating two proper names one of another. It is only by means of general names that we can convey any information, predicate any attribute, even of an individual, much more of a class. Rigorously speaking we could get on without any oth

ing general names, so that these names, and the general propositions in