through its own conversation as that of others, accomplishes the development of its Reason, and acquires that really concrete Logic, which consists less in logical rules than in the proper application of them ; just as the rules of harmony are learnt by persons of musical talent simply by playing the piano, without reading music or studying thorough-bass.—The deaf and dumb alone are excluded from the above-mentioned logical training through the acquirement of speech ; therefore they are almost as unreasonable as animals, when they have not been taught to read by the very artificial means specially adapted for their requirements, which takes the place of the natural schooling of Reason.
§ 27. The Utility of Conceptions.
The fundamental essence of our Reason or thinking faculty is, as we have seen, the power of abstraction, or the faculty of forming conceptions : it is therefore the presence of these in our consciousness which produces such amazing results. That it should be able to do this, rests mainly on the following grounds.
It is just because they contain less than the representations from which they are drawn, that conceptions are easier to deal with than representations ; they are, in fact, to these almost as the formula of higher arithmetic to the mental operations which give rise to them and which they represent, or as a logarithm to its number. They only contain just the part required of the many representations from which they are drawn; if instead we were to try to recall those representations themselves by means of the imagination, we should, as it were, have to lug about a load of unessential lumber, which would only embarrass us ; whereas, by the help of conceptions, we are enabled to think only those parts and relations of all these representations
