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So it is impossible to write of the French soldier as a single figure, or to make large generalizations about the armies of France. The coward skulks by the side of the war. The priestly spirit in the ranks is outraged by the obscenities of the debauchee.

Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the living.

That is all he can tell us of beauty, and, indeed, he may be innocent of the measure of his effort; and the next generation may ridicule the very thing which gave us so much pleasure, pleasure we proved to our own satisfaction to be legitimate and well founded by many sound generalizations about art.

This, however, is a totally different kind of induction from ours; it is not an inference from facts known to facts unknown, but a mere short-hand registration of facts known. The two simulated arguments which we have quoted, are not generalizations; the propositions purporting to be conclusions from them, are not really general propositions.

An important portion of the field of inductive knowledge does not consist of universal truths, but of approximations to such truths; and when a conclusion is said to rest on probable evidence, the premises it is drawn from are usually generalizations of this sort.

It is not a field on which Seward's hazarded generalizations can be of any earthly use; but they must confuse all. Seward is free from that coarse, semi-barbarous know-nothingism which rules paramount, not the genuine people, but the would-be something, the half-civilized gentlemen.

It is only very recently that they have been seen at all, and they have never been published from that day to this. Out of the confused mass of documents appertaining to the trial, a few generalizations can be made which show the nature of the attack upon him.

They must be taken exclusively from the generalizations by which scientific thinkers have ascended to great and comprehensive laws of natural phenomena. Now it is seldom possible, in these complicated inquiries, to go much beyond the initial steps, without calling in the instrument of Deduction, and the temporary aid of hypothesis; as I myself, in common with Dr.

In other cases, it might be doubtful how far the consequences that may seem to be deducible from a theory could be legitimately urged in argument, especially when these consequences are disavowed by the author of it; but, in the present case, the consequences are explicitly declared, not less than the principles, they are even exhibited as corollaries rigorously deduced from them; and thus the very comprehensiveness of the system, which gives it so much of the aspect of completeness, and which has fascinated the minds of speculative men, always fond of bold and sweeping generalizations, may be found to afford the most conclusive proof of its inherent weakness, and to show that it comes into fatal collision, at all points, not only with the doctrines of Natural and Revealed Religion, but also with the practical duties and political rights of mankind.

There was an attempt to eliminate the more conspicuous departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's weak moments; and it was only with the establishment of Darwin's great generalizations that the hard and fast classificatory system broke down and individuality came to its own.