A Logic of Facts; Or, Every-day ReasoningHolyoake, George Jacob
Philosophy
A Logic of Facts; Or, Every-day Reasoning
Holyoake, George Jacob
Logic
applied, or seemed to apply, recondite principles which they were wholly
unable to state. This is a natural consequence of having a mind stored
with appropriate particulars, and having been long accustomed to reason
at once from these to fresh particulars, without practising the habit of
stating to oneself or to others the corresponding general propositions.
An old warrior, on a rapid glance at the outlines of the ground, is able
at once to give the necessary orders for a skilful arrangement of his
troops; though if he has received little theoretical instruction, and
has seldom been called upon to answer to other people for his conduct,
he may never have had in his mind a single general theorem respecting
the relation between ground and array. But his experience of
encampments, under circumstances more or less similar, has left a number
of vivid, unexpressed, ungeneralised analogies in his mind, the most
appropriate of which, instantly suggesting itself, determines him to a
judicious arrangement.
'The skill of an uneducated person in the use of weapons, or of tools,
is of a precisely similar nature. The savage who executes unerringly the
exact throw which brings down his game, or his enemy, in the manner
most suited to his purpose, under the operation of all the conditions
necessarily involved, the weight and form of the weapon, the direction
and distance of the object, the action of the wind, &c., owes this
power to a long series of previous experiments, the results of which he
certainly never framed into any verbal theorems or rules. It is the
same in all extraordinary manual dexterity. Not long ago a Scotch
manufacturer procured from England, at a high rate of wages, a working
dyer, famous for producing very fine colours, with a view of teaching
to his other workmen the same skill. The workman came; but his mode of
proportioning the ingredients, in which lay the secret of the effects he
produced, was by taking them up in handfuls while the common method was
to weigh them. The manufacturer sought to make him turn his handling
system into an equivalent weighing system, that the general principle of
his peculiar mode of proceeding might be ascertained. This, however,
the man found himself quite unable to do, and therefore could impart
his skill to nobody. He had, from the individual cases of his own
experience, established a connection in his mind between fine effects
of colour, and tactual perceptions in handling his dyeing materials;
and from these perceptions he could, in any particular cases, infer the
means to be employed, and the effect which would be produced, but could
not put others in possession of the grounds on which he proceeded, from
having never generalised them in his own mind, or expressed them in
language.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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