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Updated: May 2, 2025
There is a subtle connection between such gatherings and the gathering of what are called the elements, a sympathetic connection, which we shall, no doubt, one day understand, when we have collected facts enough on the subject to make a comprehensive generalization, after Mr. Buckle's method.
No one, probably, ever called night the cause of day; mankind must so soon have arrived at the very obvious generalization, that the state of general illumination which we call day would follow from the presence of a sufficiently luminous body, whether darkness had preceded or not.
Even to Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs.
They will speak, as they tell us, as the masters always have spoken from of old to them who are without; they will 'open their mouths in parables, they will 'utter their dark sayings on the harp. They know that men are already prepared by nature's own instruction, to feel in a fact, to receive in historical representations truths which would startle them in the abstract, truths which they are not yet prepared to disengage from the historical combinations in which they receive them; though with every repetition, and especially with the pointed, selected, prolonged repetition of the teacher, where the 'ILLUSTRIOUS INSTANCE' is selected and cleared of its extraneous incident, and made to enter the mind alone, and pierce it with its principle, with every such repetition, the step to that generalization and axiom becomes insensibly shorter and more easy.
Another striking instance is afforded by Dalton’s generalization, commonly known as the atomic theory.
According as this circumstance, or the falsity of the testimony, appears more improbable—that is, conflicts with an approximate generalization of a higher order—we believe the testimony, or disbelieve it; with a stronger or a weaker degree of conviction, according to the preponderance; at least until we have sifted the matter further.
It is, however, still no more than a rough generalization, a statistical average. It cannot tell us what will result from a given cause on a given occasion. It is a law of tendency, not a precise and invariable law such as those of physics aim at being.
The unprofessional experimenter or observer has no large experience to correct his hasty generalization. He wants to believe that the means he employed effected his cure. He feels grateful to the person who advised it, he loves to praise the pill or potion which helped him, and he has a kind of monumental pride in himself as a living testimony to its efficacy.
The broadest generalization with regard to the African tribes is that which separates most of the peoples south of the Sahara Desert into two great groups, the Negro tribes, whose habitat may be roughly indicated as extending between the Atlantic and Gallaland in East Africa, with the Sahara as their northern, and the latitude of the Cameroons as their southern, boundaries; and the Bantu tribes, occupying nearly all of Africa south of the Negroes.
But between these data there are great interrogative blanks no generalization will fill cases, situations, temperaments. Each life, it seems to me, in that intelligent, conscious, social state to which the world is coming, must square itself to these things in its own way, and fill in the details of its individual moral code according to its needs. So it seems, at least, to one limited thinker.
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