I may grasp the mediate necessary connexion of A with D, as the result of a series of acts of intellectual insight in which I have 'seen' the immediate necessary connexions of A with B, of B with C, and of C with D. However long and complex the mediation, however many links the chain of proof may contain, the inference is infallible because each of its steps is an infallible intuition.[1]
Yet the two great advocates of this analysis of mediation themselves bear witness against it. The failure of Aristotle's attempt to prove[2] that there must be immediate premisses in the texture of knowledge is not perhaps of much importance. But the thesis is irreconcilable with his general view of the relation of premisses to conclusion. For if, as he steadily insists, the demonstrated conclusion is the fulfilment of its premisses; if it is their realization, in which alone they attain their full significance:—they cannot be self-contained, self-evident truths in their isolation. The process of mediation is not the adding of line to line to form a longer line, nor the attachment of self-supporting bits of truth to one another. It is the unfolding of a germ—a natural development or growth: and there is, so to say, nothing in it which comes out at the end as it went in at the beginning. Nor does
- ↑ For a fuller account of the theory of reasoning in the Regulae see my Essay on the Nature of Truth, pp. 69-72.
- ↑ Cf. Post. Anal. A. 19-22.
