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Updated: June 2, 2025


The accusation of exaggeration or hasty generalization cannot then be well sustained. Where, however, I venture to differ with Dr. Arnold is in the assumption that this low standard of morality must be ascribed to boy nature alone. Undoubtedly this is the case in part. But there is a far more potent cause than natural instinct.

A meal was being served on deck in the shade of the spanker, and Jerry, sitting between the two men received his share. Already he had made the generalization that of the two, the captain was the superior god, giving many orders that the mate obeyed. The mate, on the other hand, gave orders to the blacks, but never did he give orders to the captain.

An excellent example of this transition may be seen in the present state of the argument in favor of commission government: at first, as we have seen, it depended chiefly on reasoning from analogy; by this time enough cities have adopted the plan to make it possible to classify them, and so reason by generalization.

Still, we have only advanced a step in the generalization, and the real, efficient cause of the appearances is still hidden from us by an impenetrable veil. Gravitation is now referred to the communication of motion by impulse; electricity, to the combination and separation of different fluids; affinity, to the attraction or repulsion of these fluids.

Every description, therefore, of a river and its valleys, from its sources in the mountains to its mouth where it delivers those waters to the sea, is interesting to the present theory, which is the generalization of those facts by which the end or intention of nature is to be observed.

Habits of accuracy and of generalization became formed insensibly; and that precious faculty which seizes, amidst accumulated materials, those that serve the object for which they are explored, that faculty which quadruples all force, by concentrating it on one point, once roused into action, gave purpose to every toil and quickness to each perception.

We may have inferred, from historical evidence, that the uncontrolled power of a monarch, of an aristocracy, or of the majority, will often be abused: but we are entitled to rely on this generalization with much greater assurance when it is shown to be a corollary from still better established facts; the very low degree of elevation of character ever yet attained by the average of mankind, and the little efficacy, for the most part, of the modes of education hitherto practiced, in maintaining the predominance of reason and conscience over the selfish propensities.

Though we are quite clear about the constancy of the order of Nature, at the present time, and in the present state of things, it by no means necessarily follows that we are justified in expanding this generalization into the infinite past, and in denying, absolutely, that there may have been a time when Nature did not follow a fixed order, when the relations of cause and effect were not definite, and when extranatural agencies interfered with the general course of Nature.

There is thus no lack of demonstration from all quarters that mental facts and brain processes belong together; and yet, however much we may cumulate such popular and scientific observations, they would never by themselves admit of the sweeping generalization that there cannot be any mental state which is not accompanied by a process in the central nervous system.

Once planted victoriously on the conquered ramparts the hypothesis becomes a theory a generalization of science marking a fresh coign of vantage, which can never be successfully assailed unless by a new host of antagonistic facts. Such generalizations, with the events leading directly up to them, have chiefly occupied our attention.

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