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These general truths will doubtless make their first appearance in the character of hypotheses; not proved, nor even admitting of proof, in the first instance, but assumed as premisses for the purpose of deducing from them the known laws of concrete phenomena. But this, though their initial, cannot be their final state.
The instrument of Deduction alone is adequate to unravel the complexities proceeding from this source; and the four methods have little more in their power than to supply premisses for, and a verification of, our deductions.
If I know that all Greeks are men and that Socrates was a man, and I infer that Socrates was a Greek, I cannot be said to know that Socrates was a Greek, because, although my premisses and my conclusion are true, the conclusion does not follow from the premisses. But are we to say that nothing is knowledge except what is validly deduced from true premisses? Obviously we cannot say this.
We may say: 'Derivative knowledge is what is validly deduced from premisses known intuitively'. In this statement there is no formal defect, but it leaves the definition of intuitive knowledge still to seek. Leaving on one side, for the moment, the question of intuitive knowledge, let us consider the above suggested definition of derivative knowledge.
It remains to be examined whether this science resembles geometry in the further circumstance, that some of its inductions are not exactly true; and that the peculiar certainty ascribed to it, on account of which its propositions are called Necessary Truths, is fictitious and hypothetical, being true in no other sense than that those propositions necessarily follow from the hypothesis of the truth of premisses which are avowedly mere approximations to truth.
Now Christ during His life upon earth was of all men the poorest, casting from Him all worldly authority. I deduce from these premisses as a simple counsel of my own that the Pope should surrender all temporal authority to the civil power and advise his clergy to do the same." The boldness of his words sprang perhaps from a knowledge that his end was near.
No premisses, no arguments therefore, can so accommodate this truth to us as not to leave the belief in it an act of mental ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished from sight. Divest reason of its trust, and the universe stops at the impersonal stage there is no God; and yet, if the first step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and boldest speculator rarely declines it?
He can openly mark his dissent from it, without exacerbating the orthodox sentiment by galling pleasantries or bitter animadversion upon details. We are now awake to the all-important truth that belief in this or that detail of superstition is the result of an irrational state of mind, and flows logically from superstitious premisses.
Now such an argument is not hard to follow; and if it is granted that its premisses are true in fact, no one will deny that the conclusion must also be true. But it depends for its truth upon an instance of a general logical principle. The logical principle is as follows: 'Suppose it known that if this is true, then that is true.
See how logic is multiplying converts year by year." "But it's the glory of Englishmen to be illogical," said Peter, with a laugh. "Our capacity for not following premisses to their logical consequences is the principal source of our national greatness. So the bulk of the English are likely to resist conversion for centuries to come are they not?
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