But while we accept this explanation, and are grateful for the
deliverance it works for us, we must also admit, (and we are not aware
that Mr Mill would controvert this admission,) that there is a large
class of cases in which our reasoning betrays no reference to this
anterior experience, and where the usual explanation given by teachers
of logic is perfectly applicable; cases where our object is, not the
discovery of truth for ourselves, but to convince another of his
error, by showing him that the proposition, which in his blindness or
prejudice he has chosen to contradict, is part and parcel of some
other proposition to which he has given, and is at all times ready to
give, his acquiescence. In such cases, we frequently content ourselves
with throwing before him this alternative--refuse your _major_, to
which you have again and again assented, or accept, as involved in it,
our _minor_ proposition, which you have persisted in controverting.
It will have been gathered from the foregoing train of observation,
that, in direct contradistinction to Archbishop Whately, who had
represented induction (so far as it consisted of an act of
ratiocination) as resolvable into deductive and syllogistic reasoning,
our author has resolved the syllogism, and indeed all deductive
reasoning whatever, ultimately into examples of induction. In doing
this, he is encountered by a metaphysical notion very prevalent in the
present day, which lies across his path, and which he has to remove.
We allude to the distinction between contingent and necessary truths;
it being held by many philosophical writers that all necessary and
universal truths owe their origin, not to experience (except as
_occasion_ of their development,) and not, consequently, to the
ordinary process of induction, but flow from higher sources--flow
immediately from some supreme faculty to which the name of reason has
by some been exclusively appropriated, in order to distinguish it from
the understanding, the faculty judging according to sense. We will
pause a while upon this topic.
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