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As the author himself points out, his subjects were not sufficiently numerous to justify far-reaching generalizations, but it may be worth while to summarize some of his results.
And I do believe that truth lies in these loose generalizations. I do not think it possible that any bodily pains could eat out the love of joy, that is so substantially part of me, towards hills, and rocks, and steep waters; and I have had some trial.
In like manner, when the grand seigneurs and noble dames of that aristocratic age wept over the sorrows of the "New Heloise," or craved that imaginary state of untutored innocence which Rousseau so morbidly described, or admired those brilliant generalizations of laws which Montesquieu had penned, or laughed at the envenomed ironies of Voltaire, or quoted the atheistic doctrines of D'Alembert and Diderot, or enthusiastically discussed the economical theories of Dr.
The importance of this class of generalizations is not very great; for, though it frequently happens that we see no reason why that which is true of most individuals of a class is not true of the remainder, nor are able to bring the former under any general description which can distinguish them from the latter, yet if we are willing to be satisfied with propositions of a less degree of generality, and to break down the class A into sub-classes, we may generally obtain a collection of propositions exactly true.
Sainte-Beuve realized that such methods the slap-dash pronouncements of a Johnson or the narrow generalizations of a Boileau were in reality not critical at all.
But while she held inflexibly to her creed in all its generalizations, she made all those sweet illogical exceptions which women of her kind are given to making. In general, she firmly believed that everybody who failed to have a saving faith in the vicarious atonement of Christ would be lost. In particular, she excepted many individual cases among her own acquaintance.
In the field of biological science progress has not been so marked, yet the elaborate garnering of facts regarding anatomy, physiology, and the zoological sciences is at least a valuable preparation for the generalizations of a later time.
Science starts, therefore, from generalizations of the form, "A is usually followed by B." This is the nearest approach that can be made to a causal law of the traditional sort.
But the difficulties, which are many finance being, perhaps, the least of them arise on all sides, when a study of the subject goes a little deeper than the generalizations popularly made about irrigation and its revival in a land which was once, before all things, dependent for its prosperity upon this science.
The progress, so far, has been by no means a lineal one each son a better man than his father nor even, as some would have it, a spiral one periodical recurrences to the same historical ideas, but each recurrence a nearer approach to the philosophical idea but it has been far more complex and irregular than any geometrical figure will illustrate. These facile generalizations do not express it.