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I must further premise that the Jews never make any mention or account of secondary, or particular causes, but in a spirit of religion, piety, and what is commonly called godliness, refer all things directly to the Deity.
In the fulfilment of our promise of "a future story," which we made at the termination of "The Ghost of Howdycraigs," we may premise thus:
To predict what we will do in a given case is not easy for a foreigner. It is not easy even for ourselves. We have few abstract principles, and reliable induction from our past is not easy. We are often guided by what Mr. Justice Wendell Holmes has called "the intuition more subtle than any particular major premise."
On examining, then, these two general formulæ, we find that in both of them, one premise, the major, is a universal proposition; and according as this is affirmative or negative, the conclusion is so too.
Indeed it was from this premise that he developed the celebrated "variation" theory which is, now, generally admitted to have compromised the whole principle of "Natural Selection" while it has given a wonderful impetus to all recent investigations and experiments on the lines first indicated by Mendel.
The small boy who said that he could not keep step because he had a cold in his head was relying on a sound general truth, Colds in the head make one stupid, for his major premise, but his condition prevented his disentangling it; and all of us every day use minor premises for which we should be incapable of stating the major.
They are proposed as the causa existendi of our beliefs, not as their logical cue or premise, and still less as their objective deliverance or content. They assign the only intelligible practical meaning to that difference in our beliefs which our habit of calling them true or false comports.
'The immediate volition of the Deity, manifested in special creation, virtually answers Paley; while we of to-day are able to reply, 'The agency of natural laws, to wit, inheritance, variation, survival of the fittest, and probably of other laws as yet not discovered. Now, of course, according to the former of these two premises, there can be no more legitimate conclusion than that the difference in question is due to intelligent and special design; but, according to the other premise, it is equally clear that no conclusion can be more unwarranted; for, under the latter view, the greater rotundity of the crystalline lens in a fish's eye no more exhibits the presence of any special design than does the adaptation of a river to the bed which it has itself been the means of excavating.
Numbed for an instant, his brain cleared now, working with lightning speed, leaping from premise to conclusion. The crush in the theatre lobby the pushing, the jostling, the close contact the Wowzer, the slickest, cleverest pickpocket in the United States! For a moment he could have laughed aloud in a sort of ghastly, defiant mockery he himself had predicted an unexpected aftermath, had he not!
So working on that premise of injustices to be righted, malcontents from the minorities of both factions were induced with fantastic ceremonials of initiation into the membership of the secret brotherhood.
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