recognize the common attribute, without conjecturally invoking the aid of any previously acquired conception, or, in other words, of any hypothesis. Having failed in this, we call upon our imagination for some hypothesis of a possible place, or a possible point of resemblance, and then look to see whether the facts agree with the conjecture.
For such cases something more is required than a mind accustomed to accurate observation and comparison. It must be a mind stored with general conceptions, previously acquired, of the sorts which bear affinity to the subject of the particular inquiry. And much will also depend on the natural strength and acquired culture of what has been termed the scientific imagination; on the faculty possessed of mentally arranging known elements into new combinations, such as have not yet been observed in nature, though not contradictory to any known laws.
But the variety of intellectual habits, the purposes which they serve, and the modes in which they may be fostered and cultivated, are considerations belonging to the Art of Education: a subject far wider than Logic, and which this treatise does not profess to discuss. Here, therefore, the present chapter may properly close.
Chapter III.
Of Naming, As Subsidiary To Induction.
§ 1. It does not belong to the present undertaking to dwell on the
importance of language as a medium of human intercourse, whether for
purposes of sympathy or of information. 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, ultimately
dependent; their potency as a means of forming, and of riveting,
associations among our other ideas; a subject on which an able
thinker(210) has thus written:
"Names are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold on the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when passed might be dissipated forever, are, by their connection with language, always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves, are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name abides with us, 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 common philosophy of the age. It directs us to observe and know things which we should have overlooked; it supplies us with classifications ready made, by which things are arranged (as far as the light of by-gone generations admits) with the objects to which they bear the greatest total resemblance. The number of general names in a language, and
