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 practicing the habit of stating to one’s
self 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 skillful 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, in circumstances more or
less similar, has left a number of vivid, unexpressed, ungeneralized
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, etc., owes this power to a
long series of previous experiments, the results of which he certainly
never framed into any verbal theorems or rules. The same thing may
generally be said of any other 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 colors, with the 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
color, and tactual perceptions in handling his dyeing materials; and from
these perceptions he could, in any particular case, infer the means to be
employed, and the effects which would be produced, but could not put
others in possession of the grounds on which he proceeded, from having
never generalized them in his own mind, or expressed them in language.