A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I
John Stuart Mill · en
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, 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, &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. 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 colours, 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 connexion 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 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.