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"Events arise without any cause," and secondly, "The same causes do not produce, in the same circumstances, the same effects." Both these propositions are implicitly denied in the Law of Causation; yet their explicit statement greatly adds to the clearness of the principle.

It has been urged with great force by Ferrier, in his Institutes of Metaphysics, that the statement of the counter-proposition is a means of exposing errors, especially such as are sheltered under vagueness of language.

It is sometimes said "Might is right;" what does this deny? Right has many meanings, and as many opposites. If the opposite meant is wrong, the obverse would be "Might is seldom or never applied in support of wrong,"—a statement that would not be so readily hazarded.

Take again the proposition—"The standard of Art is Nature." What is denied by this? On examining the use made of the maxim, we find the obverse is, "The standard of Art is not Nature badly imitated." In other words, the principle is, when Art imitates Nature, it should imitate well and not ill.

The style of the book of Proverbs abounds in obverse iteration; see chaps. xii., xiii., &c.

59. III. By Examples, or Particular Instances. This must always be the leading method of expounding general principles.

To quote from Physical Science. The statement of the First Law of Motion,—the perseverance of movement once begun,—is followed up by a number of cases or examples of this perseverance. "A large spinning top, with a fine hard point, set in rapid motion in a vacuum, on a hard smooth surface, will continue turning for hours." "A pendulum swinging in a vacuum has to overcome only the slight friction at its point of suspension, and, when once in motion, will vibrate for a day or more." "The earth's rotation maintains itself without diminution," &c. See also Extracts XIII., XVI.

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60. When the sole object is to make an abstruse principle intelligible, as in pure scientific exposition, the examples must be chosen on the following grounds:—

(1.) They must themselves be intelligible or familiar to the persons addressed.

(2.) Their number is to be regulated by the difficulty and the comprehensiveness of the principle.

(3.) They should be at first simple, and in the end complicated, so as to show the force of the principle in explaining matters of difficulty.

(4.) They are not to contain distracting accompaniments.

This last is the hardest condition to satisfy, and yet the most imperative. To obtain a series of examples bearing directly and evidently upon one principle, yet not suggesting any matter away from the purpose, constitutes the chief labor of the expositor.

61. The particulars are sometimes mentioned first, and the generality last, as in the order of discovery. This gives a stimulus to the learner to find out the principle for himself, and creates a kind of suspense, or plot interest.

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62. The extreme case is an example showing the principle, as it were, in an exaggerated form. (See Htpeeb

le.)

Hume, in maintaining that men possess genuinely disinterested impulses, and revolt from inflicting gratuitous pain, puts an extreme instance thus :—" Would any man, in walking along, tread as willingly on the gouty toes of another man that he has no quarrel with, as on the hard flint and pavement?

Plato puts the question as to pleasure being the sole end of life (unfairly) in this extreme form :- "You are to be without thought, intelligence, reason, sight, memory; you are not to

have any opinion as to present enjoyment, any remembrance of past, or anticipation of future; you are to live the life of an oyster, with great present pleasure."

"If we wish to know the nature of the species hard," says Plato again, "we should look to the hardest things."

63. A principle is sometimes embodied in a concrete example.

Paley states the question "whether the moral sentiment be innate" by mentioning a painful incident in Roman History, and supposing it propounded to a certain wild boy caught in the woods of Hanover. In the same work, when inquiring into the foundations of Moral Obligation, he selects the special duty of Truth to try the point upon :—"Why am I obliged to keep my word?" A writer on the Immortality of the Soul puts the question under an individual case :—"Is Socrates alive now?" Adam Smith's exposition of the principle of Division of Labor is embodied in the manufacture of a pin.

64. There are many generalities that are wanting in the characters of science; they are but vague approximations to certainty, and their degree of generality does not make them technical or abstruse. They serve the literary ends of popular interest as much as, or more than, the scientific end of truth.

As we pass from science in its highest rigor of numerical precision and infallible prediction—the truths of Mathematics, Astronomy, Mechanics, and Chemistry—to the subjects of Life, Mind, and Society, the increasing complication and the absence of numerical estimate render the principles less definite and certain, although they are still of the scientific class. In Physiology and the Natural History departments, in the Human Mind, in Politics, Political Economy, and Jurisprudence, we frequently find high generalities, considerable precision of language, and careful verification; so that these branches still partake of the characters of science. But in Ethics, Criticism, History, Human Character, and commonplace Politics and

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Education, the generalities are for the most part of the loosest kind, and often serve merely as a framework for poetical and literary illustration. The maxims of mind, character, and conduct, usual in poetry, would fall under this head.

The popular literary essay, as we find it in Bacon, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, Macaulay, Helps, and in the magazines and reviews of our own day, is a combination of general principles, ethical, critical, historical, political, &C., with poetic interest. The generalities, when not instigated by urgent practical needs, are thrown into the form best adapted for elegance and adornment. See Extract XIV.

65. In delineating character, and 'in Criticism, the expository methods, although still predominant, are greatly modified.

The methodical delineation of character, to be scientific, would require to be based on a general scheme of character, uniformly applied to each case. But under any mode of delineation, it is an obvious maxim that the points should be grouped under distinct heads, according to natural connection, and not scattered at random. See Extracts III., XII.

The same remarks are applicable to Criticism. There is a scientific mode founded on the systematic application of general principles, and a mode determined by the wish to produce a work of art.

66. IV. By Illustrations, as distinguished from Examples.

It has been seen that the Figures of Similarity—as the simile and the metaphor—are largely used for assisting the understanding, that is, for making plain what is naturally difficult or obscure. Two things, in their nature different, may yet have such an amount of similarity that the one shall cast light on the other.

In the sciences of the first group above enumerated—Mathematics, Astronomy, Mechanics, Optics, Chemistry, &c.—the illustrations principally employed are of a severe type; they

are such as diagrams, models, and sensible representations of what eludes the senses. Mathematical points and lines are made visible to the eye. The rays of light, the vibrations of sound, and the still finer undulations of the ether, are given in the same palpable form; indeed, the undulations of the assumed etherial medium have been represented by Wheatstone in a mechanical model. The supposed ultimate atoms of bodies are studied upon balls and circles of tangible and visible dimensions.

Comparisons drawn from one science to another are frequent. A body, like nitrogen, that does not readily combine, will be termed by a chemist inert. The mechanical distinction of statical and dynamical, and the notions of equilibrium, moving power, resistance, are widely diffused in sciences where the phenomena are not mechanical.

A still greater approach to figurative comparison is found even in these rigid sciences. The mutual cohesion of atoms of one substance, as copper, tin, water, salt, is kindred attraction; the attraction between the atoms of two different substances, as in an alloy of copper and tin, or a solution of salt in water, is alien attraction. When a body is submitted chemically to the operation of the ordinary tests, the chemist speaks of its department. The human body is the house we live in; the brain is the dome of thought. Physiology, says Haller, is animated anatomy.

In the sciences of the second rank—Natural History, Geography, Physiology, Mind, Logic, Politics, Political Economy, Jurisprudence, &c.—the severe methods are relieved by figurative comparisons.

In the Human Mind, metaphorical illustration is abundant and often misleading. According to one view, the infant intelligence is a tabula rasa, where experience inscribes everything; another view is expressed under the similitude of a prepared plate in photography. See Extract II.

Plato's doctrine that the body obstructs the soul, is combated by Kant, through the simile of a dove cleaving the thin air, and supposing that in a vacuum its movements would be more rapid.

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