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Updated: June 21, 2025
In those books, every process which sets out from a less general and terminates in a more general expression,—which admits of being stated in the form, “This and that A are B, therefore every A is B,”—is called an induction, whether anything be really concluded or not; and the induction is asserted to be not perfect, unless every single individual of the class A is included in the antecedent, or premiss: that is, unless what we affirm of the class has already been ascertained to be true of every individual in it, so that the nominal conclusion is not really a conclusion, but a mere reassertion of the premisses.
To say that there is no logical alternative between Rome and Agnosticism is a sufficiently shallow though popular sophism. At most it means that from certain given premisses one or other of those conclusions must follow syllogistically a statement that would be more interesting were the said premisses indisputable and admitted by all the world.
To this Professor Kolliker replies, with perfect justice, that the conclusion drawn by Pelzeln does not really follow from Darwin's premisses, and that, if we take the facts of Palaeontology as they stand, they rather support than oppose Darwin's theory.
The issue of the argument is so astonishing that if we do not tremble for its safety, it must be on account of a practical principle in our minds which enables us to confide and trust in reasons, when they are really strong and good ones.... Faith, when for convenience' sake we do distinguish it from reason, is not distinguished from reason by the want of premisses, but by the nature of the conclusions.
'He accepted willingly, we are told, 'the household conclusions on religion and politics, but they were not properly his, for he accepted them merely as conclusions and without the premisses, and it was often even a little annoying to hear him express some free opinion on religious questions in a way which showed that it was not a growth, but something picked up. Everybody who has read the story remembers the moral tragedy that followed.
We infer, we go upon reasons, we use premisses in either case. The premisses of faith are not so palpable as those of ordinary reason, but they are as real and solid premisses all the same. Our faith in the existence of a God and a future state is founded upon reasons as much so as the belief in the commonest kind of facts.
It was quite natural to place them together, and that the Chief of the Apostles should figure as the conclusion to the premisses set forth by the other statues of this portal. "Finally, in addition to this series of patriarchs and prophets, you may see there, in the hollow between the pilasters, a pair of statues, one on each side of the door: Elijah the Tishbite, and Elisha his disciple.
If the deduced conclusion can be verified in fact, the premisses grow more assured. Thus every real inference is an experiment, and 'proof' is an affair of continuous trial and verification not an infinite falling back upon an elusive 'certainty, but an infinite reaching forwards towards a fuller consummation. It is inevitably a petitio principii.
No premisses require closer scrutiny than those which lead to the constantly echoed conclusion, "He must have known," or "He must have read." I marvel that this facility of belief on the side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration that the easiest of all things to the human mind is not to know and not to read.
Practical maxims, therefore, till so confronted, are not universally true even for a given end, much less for conduct generally, and must not be used, as they are by the geometrical school, as ultimate premisses.
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