Thought-Culture; Or, Practical Mental TrainingAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Thought-Culture; Or, Practical Mental Training
Atkinson, William Walker
Thought and thinking
Thomson says: "The system of anatomy which has immortalized the name of
Oken, is the consequence of a flash of anticipation which glanced
through his mind when he picked up in a chance walk the skull of a deer,
bleached and disintegrated by the weather, and exclaimed, after a
glance, 'It is part of a vertebral column.' When Newton saw the apple
fall, the anticipatory question flashed through his mind, 'Why do not
the heavenly bodies fall like this apple?' In neither case had accident
any important share; Newton and Oken were prepared by the deepest
previous study to seize upon the unimportant fact offered to them, and
show how important it might become; and if the apple and the deer-skull
had been wanting, some other falling body, or some other skull, would
have touched the string so ready to vibrate. But in each case there was
a great step of anticipation; Oken thought he saw the type of the whole
skeleton in a single vertebra, whilst Newton conceived at once that the
whole universe was full of bodies tending to fall."
Passing from the consideration of Inductive Reasoning to that of
Deductive Reasoning we find ourselves confronted with an entirely
opposite condition. As Brooks says: "The two methods of reasoning are
the reverse of each other. One goes from particulars to generals; the
other from generals to particulars. One is a process of analysis; the
other is a process of synthesis. One rises from facts to laws; the
other descends from laws to facts. Each is independent of the other; and
each is a valid and essential method of inference."
_Deductive Reasoning_ is, as we have seen, dependent upon the process of
deriving a particular truth from a general law, principle or truth, upon
the fundamental axiom that: "What is true of the whole is true of its
parts." It is an analytical process, just as Inductive Reasoning is
synthetical. It is a descending process, just as Inductive Reasoning is
ascending.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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