proceed by fresh comparisons to a different general conception. Sometimes, again, we find that the same conception will serve, by merely leaving out some of its circumstances; and by this higher effort of abstraction, we obtain a still more general conception; as in the case formerly referred to, the scientific world rose from the conception of poles to the general conception of opposite properties in opposite directions; or as those South-Sea islanders, whose conception of a quadruped had been abstracted from hogs (the only animals of that description which they had seen), when they afterward compared that conception with other quadrupeds, dropped some of the circumstances, and arrived at the more general conception which Europeans associate with the term.
These brief remarks contain, I believe, all that is well grounded in the doctrine, that the conception by which the mind arranges and gives unity to phenomena must be furnished by the mind itself, and that we find the right conception by a tentative process, trying first one and then another until we hit the mark. The conception is not furnished by the mind until it has been furnished to the mind; and the facts which supply it are sometimes extraneous facts, but more often the very facts which we are attempting to arrange by it. It is quite true, however, that in endeavoring to arrange the facts, at whatever point we begin, we never advance three steps without forming a general conception, more or less distinct and precise; and that this general conception becomes the clue which we instantly endeavor to trace through the rest of the facts, or rather, becomes the standard with which we thenceforth compare them. If we are not satisfied with the agreements which we discover among the phenomena by comparing them with this type, or with some still more general conception which by an additional stage of abstraction we can form from the type; we change our path, and look out for other agreements; we recommence the comparison from a different starting-point, and so generate a different set of general conceptions. This is the tentative process which Dr. Whewell speaks of; and which has not unnaturally suggested the theory, that the conception is supplied by the mind itself; since the different conceptions which the mind successively tries, it either already possessed from its previous experience, or they were supplied to it in the first stage of the corresponding act of comparison; so that, in the subsequent part of the process, the conception manifested itself as something compared with the phenomena, not evolved from them.
§ 4. If this be a correct account of the instrumentality of general conceptions in the comparison which necessarily precedes Induction, we are now able to translate into our own language what Dr. Whewell means by saying that conceptions, to be subservient to Induction, must be "clear" and "appropriate."
If the conception corresponds to a real agreement among the phenomena; if the comparison which we have made of a set of objects has led us to class them according to real resemblances and differences; the conception which does this can not fail to be appropriate, for some purpose or other. The question of appropriateness is relative to the particular object we have in view. As soon as, by our comparison, we have ascertained some agreement, something which can be predicated in common of a number of objects; we have obtained a basis on which an inductive process is capable of being founded. But the agreements, or the ulterior consequences to which those agreements lead, may be of very different degrees of
