Part 5

We have seen (X) that emotions may be excited by objects or ideas. Hence, agreeable emotions may be excited by suggesting the objects associated with the original agreeable feelings; and novel emotions may be excited by novel combinations of the ideas of experienced objects that have been signs of feelings. From this possibility has arisen that extensive province of activity called ART, which consists in imagining novel combinations of things capable of exciting novel and pleasurable emotions (not feelings), and in finding means of suggesting such ideas to others. Some of these combinations are so subtle, and the emotions they excite so exquisite, that we value the artistic work at a great price, and rank the man who imagined it among the benefactors of his species.

REASON, or the Rational Imagination, does not appeal directly to the emotions. It serves the uses of life by enabling us to imagine what we have not yet experienced but may have to experience, and the quality aimed at is accuracy of intellectual ideation, not emotional pleasure. It is found by experience that an intellect well furnished with ideas may learn to combine them into pictures or preconceptions of the future, and the indirect utility of this accomplishment is very great. If it does not, like art, give immediate sentimental pleasure, it often enables us so to control events that we are brought into conditions affording more lasting satisfaction than many expensive works of art. Reason, then, is the imaginative faculty applied to the purpose of acquiring ideas of experience that has not yet taken place, and it is good in proportion to the similarity of the idea to the anticipated or unknown experience.

Although imagination is more important than generalisation, it has received little attention from metaphysicians. Their treatment of it is not uniform, but it generally exhibits two fundamental defects. They consider it an independent or ultimate faculty, that is, one incapable of resolution into anything more simple. We have seen that it is an application of comparison, and comparison depends on the coincidence of particular ideas.

Then they regard imagination only in its artistic uses, not perceiving that it is also the basis of reason. Reason they treat as generalisation--a vice that pervades all their systems. They put reason and art in essential opposition, whereas the difference between them is only specific--a difference of use.

Some metaphysicians confound imagination with mere recollection. 'It is,' says one of them, 'the faculty representative of the phenomena both of the external and internal worlds.' But there is a great difference between the representation of what we have experienced actually, and the representation of a future and perhaps impossible event: the latter only is imaginative. 'There is no train of ideas,' says another, 'to which the term imagination may not be applied.' If a man at the end of the day calls to mind all the events of the day in a train of ideas, that is recollection, and would be very inappropriately termed imagination. According to a third, imagination has for its object the concrete as opposed to abstractions and generalities. This also is inexact. A traveller may describe in general the qualities of a foreign country or tribe of men, and we shall imagine that generality without a concrete picture. The power of imagining generalities and abstractions necessarily follows from the power of forming them in the first instance.

DIALECTIC

XVII--ITS SCOPE

The derivation of Reason as given in the preceding sections may be summed up thus:--the meeting of Minds gives Perception or primary experience; Attention selects therefrom objects of special interest to the observer; Memory retains impressions of these in the mental plasma, by which ideas of them are recollected though the originating mind be not present; community with divergence of imprint gives rise to Comparison; from this are derived Imagination and Generalisation; from imagination emerge Reason and Art.

Generalisation is thus only a collateral relation of reason, not its immediate parent nor in the direct line of descent. It is not essential to reason, but may enter as a subsidiary process into an argument. If the things we argue about are numerous it will be more correct to generalise them and then argue from the general idea, than to argue from one concrete object to another. But innumerable inferences are drawn from one particular thing to another, and these involve no generalisation.

Reason is chiefly the art of predicting by means of the intellect what will occur to us in the future. Its use is to enable us to prepare for future events in so far as our resources permit. We never predict quite accurately, but general preconceptions are better than none at all. The same process by which we preconceive the future can be applied to the conception of what is actually taking place but not within our ken--as at the antipodes--and can be applied also to events that took place in the past and will never be experienced by us. It might be objected that as regards the past we can have no motive in imagining it, seeing we can never experience it. But a conception of the past is often a necessary condition of our conceiving the future, and is artistically interesting. It awakens pleasing emotions to be able to picture to ourselves, even imperfectly, states of the world and of society that have long been obsolete.

An investigation of the manner in which reason supplies us with ideas of the unknown, involves the consideration and arrangement of so many details that it may be regarded as a small science in itself--DIALECTIC.

A dialectician (logician in the narrower sense) is neither a grammarian nor an encyclopedia of the best information on every subject. His office consists in deciding whether certain theorems are arguments or not. An ARGUMENT is an act or product of rational imagination. Theorems which purport to be arguments, but are not, are FALLACIES.

A fallacy is not merely a _bad_ argument--it is no argument at all. Quite apart from fallacy there is a goodness and badness in arguments, but with this discrimination the dialectician (as such) has nothing to do. Only persons experienced in the matter are competent to decide between good and bad arguments. Hence when the quality of an argument is in question the dialectician takes no part in the debate: he is neither combatant nor umpire. He is at most an impartial president whose chief duty is to see that people do not debate about mere words and foregone conclusions. Granting that a theorem has the qualities of an argument, the dialectician is not competent to say that it is improper or too trivial to be discussed. He is not a judge of what people ought to be interested in.

From his better knowledge of what constitutes rational prediction, a dialectician may offer his services to disentangle and render explicit involved and partial arguments. Many people reason well who are yet unable to express themselves coherently. A dialectician should be able to reconstruct an argument from the slightest hint, as a naturalist imagines an animal from a single bone. In ordinary reasoning the arguments are seldom fully expressed, and the reasoners themselves are not always quite conscious of the premises from which they argue. All such suppressed and overlooked assumptions should be brought to light by dialectic, the aim of which is to render reason as self-conscious as possible.

Though a dialectician need not be an expert in any department of knowledge, he must know the facts on which an argument is built, otherwise he may be deceived by equivocal language. Reverting to the instance of the vase--the dialectician must have seen both the whole vase and the broken vase, but he need not have any opinion as to whether the proposed handle is the most suitable, or not. That must be left to those who are familiar with vases and who are interested in the restoration of the one in question.

The definition here given of the scope and office of dialectic may appear to some too modest. But in reality there is a great deal involved in it. Philosophers have been discussing Reason for twenty centuries or more, and have not produced a satisfactory definition of it. Consequently they cannot decide with any confidence whether a theorem is an argument or a fallacy. The cleverest of them give their sanction to theorems that are demonstrably fallacies. They are evidently judging more by ear than by rule. All this causes confusion of mind and waste of energy.

Dialectic takes its general idea of reason from the higher analysis of logic, and brings the general idea to bear on concrete arguments. A dialectician makes a collection of theorems for study just as a botanist makes a collection of plants. He sorts them out into convenient classes, separates the valid or useful from the erroneous and misleading, studies the relation of language to argument and the influence for good or ill that words have upon rational thought.

From the example of the vase cited above it will be seen that in every act of reason two principal things are requisite. There must be something wholly known (or comparatively well known) and something less well known, and the reasoning or argument consists in ideally completing the latter on the model of the former. If we would predict the coming of a future season of the year we must have a picture in the mind of all the seasons in the order in which they occur. If we would go straight to a place on the surface of the earth we must have a plan of the way in our imagination. If we would predict the effect of a drug on an animal body we must have previously noticed the effect it has produced--and so on. Neither the mind nor intellect supplies spontaneously any of these models; they are all formed out of actual experience remembered and recollected. When they have been refined into extremely general ideas they are apt to be taken for innate tendencies of the intellect, as Kant erroneously thought. They are not so; all we know of the intellect is consistent with the belief that it begins with pure plasm without a trace of idea, and is absolutely indifferent to the imprints it may receive. Doctrines of innate ideas--innate forms of thought or categories--innate 'principles' of various kinds--are devices of metaphysicians to cover the weakness of their theories.

The two main parts of an argument divide naturally into four subdivisions. There is the thing argued about (corresponding to the broken vase); there is the ideal extension or restoration; in the model we reason from there are the parts corresponding to each of these. I propose to take terms for these four parts from one of the most important, formal and correct modes of reasoning--the application of a precedent or statute to a case in Law.

XVIII--THE RATIONAL PARALLEL

Every argument, whatever be the matter of it, consists in bringing a _Case_ under a _Precedent_, and applying to the case ideally the better knowledge possessed of the precedent. The _Conclusion_ (also called Inference or Deduction) is the result of this application, and is always an addition to our stock of ideas.

A conclusion has never the same reality as actual experience. It is not 'true' in that sense, though it may be 'morally' true, that is, we are ready to act upon it without hesitation--to stake our life or fortune on it. As regards actual or experienced fact there can be no argument, since it is useless to 'predict' what we already know.

Academical logicians have a doctrine the reverse of this. They assert that their syllogisms yield conclusions that are always as certain as the premises. Grant their premises and you are obliged to accept their conclusions. This is so, because a regular syllogistic conclusion is simply a restating in other words of the information, or part of the information, already contained in the premises. If the syllogism has any use at all, it is merely as an aid to recollection; no new idea is generated by it. It is needless to insist on a fact so notorious as that ordinary rational conclusions--those that form the staple of our daily thought--are not by any means so certain as the data from which they are drawn. For example, the sky is red and lowering this evening, and we conclude therefrom that the weather will be bad to-morrow. There is no doubt about the present aspect of the sky, but much doubt about the inference.

The form of an act of reasoning or argumentation may be rendered plainer by a diagram.

S A --- --- C _I_ --- ---

S A represents the precedent. S is the Subject or body of the precedent; A (the _Applicate_) is one property, or a part, or a relation of S abstracted from the rest to illustrate a case. C is the case; _I_ is the conclusion (or inference). _I_ results from imagining C to be associated with a property or relation similar to A. The sum of our _I_'s constitutes what we know of the world and man before we were born, of what is taking place in other parts of the world or universe, of what may take place in the future, and of the concealed and inaccessible parts of present objects. This is true not only of the results of our own reasoning but of what we have learned as verified knowledge from others, for the interpretation of language is, in the last analysis, a rational conclusion.

All the parts of an argument exist in the mind, but they are not always expressed in language. When treated dialectically the implicit members are expressed, and the terms arranged so as to show as clearly as possible the nature of the argument. The following are the points most necessary to be observed in constructing or analysing an argument.

(1) C must resemble S, for that is the basis of the argument. If C is not felt to be like S, or (as sometimes happens) is explicitly declared to be unlike S, there can be no conclusion. The precedent is not applicable to the case. A may, or may not, be associated with S; that is to say, a verbal negation may appear in the statement of the relation of S to A, but there must be no negation with respect to the relation of C to S.

The resemblance of C to S may, however, vary in degree from the faintest analogy to community of species. The difference between them may far outweigh their resemblance. There may even be no material likeness, but only a similarity of function, or position, or of any the most trivial attribute. Only it is to be observed that the kind and degree of resemblance between S and C determine the kind and degree of resemblance between A and _I_. We must not infer specifically unless the case is specifically like the precedent. In all other instances we can only infer proportionally or by transfusion.

(2) None of the antecedents must be a verbal or identical proposition, that is, a proposition which merely substitutes one name or nominal phrase for another; nor must the case be merely the precedent expressed in other words, or the precedent a paraphrase of the case. In any of these circumstances one of the elements of the argument is wanting; we have two names for one thing or two propositions giving the same information.

(3) The precedent may (as has been already remarked) be a general idea, or may be an individual idea or object. If S A has occurred frequently it is certain to be generalised, and so may form a maxim, a law, a rule, an induction, &c. But one well-observed precedent is enough to suggest a conclusion, if there has been no experience to the contrary. There is therefore no dialectical difference between arguing from a general idea (class notion) to an individual or subordinate idea, and arguing from one individual to another. Comparison and inference occur in both.

(4) After separating A from S care should be taken that it is A and not S that is used to generate _I_. Examples are plentiful of theorems in which S and A change parts, which invalidates the conclusion. Other errors in stating theorems intended to be arguments will be noticed under the head of 'Fallacies.'

The following is an argument conformable to the above rules.

Tyrants | deserve death --------------------+----------------------------- Caesar was a tyrant | _no doubt he deserved death_

This square mode of stating the argument is adapted from the general type, and brings out the mutual relations of the compared parts better than the three-lined arrangement. The word 'therefore,' which usually introduces a logical conclusion, is ambiguous. It may mean that the antecedents are the causes of the fact mentioned in the conclusion, or merely that the antecedents are the reasons why we believe the conclusion. The former is the scientific 'therefore,' the latter is the purely dialectical. I shall generally omit the illative word, and print conclusions in italics, besides entering them invariably in the fourth compartment of the parallel when this arrangement is adopted.

An idea once generated in the intellect is not to be erased at pleasure. It can be obliterated only by the process of forgetting. If after we have formed a dialectical conclusion we meet with evidence that contradicts it, the only result of that evidence is to affix a mark of falsity to the conclusion, so that as often as it is recollected the stigma is recollected too, and neutralises the effect of the idea. A negative or destructive argument is thus, plasmically speaking, a positive addition to the idea it seeks to efface. For the time being it renders the idea more conspicuous, as the word CANCELLED stamped in large letters across a document makes it more evident than it was before; but no doubt the stigmatising of an idea hastens the process of oblivion, for we thenceforth bestow less attention upon it. Stigmatic arguments are not another species, but merely the ordinary constructive arguments used for a particular purpose.

Suppose we have inferred from the general resemblance of the earth to the moon that the latter is inhabited, we stigmatise this belief by such an argument as--

Without air | animals cannot live ----------------------------+----------------------------------- There is no air in the moon | _there can be no life in the moon_

There is an exception to the rule that argument is superfluous when the speaker has already verified the conclusion. It is when he is addressing a person who has not had the same experience as himself and who doubts his word. The speaker may then resort to arguments drawn from antecedents recognised by the hearer, if any such are applicable to the subject. But a fact may be truly reported though neither the witness nor a sceptical hearer can find dialectical antecedents to prove it, for there may be no relation between the fact in question and any prior knowledge they possess, or they may not be able to find the relation.

This brings us again to that view of the intellect which represents it as artificial and limited by experience. Man is rational only on matters familiar to him; in utterly novel circumstances he is irrational, and must fall back for guidance on his general mental sentiment, or the advice of persons more experienced than himself.

XIX--HYPOTHETICAL ARGUMENTS

It is allowable to imagine ourselves placed in circumstances not yet realised, or in possession of information not yet acquired, and to anticipate or rehearse the reasoning we should employ under the supposed conditions. Such arguments take in language a conditional or hypothetical phraseology.

The case may be entirely fictitious, but I cannot find a valid instance of a whole precedent being fictitious. Its dubiety turns on our knowledge or ignorance of the applicate. Has a subject such or such an attribute? Then it may be applied to illustrate a certain case. 'If it is true that Damon and Pythias are inseparable, _then Pythias must be in town_, for I have just seen Damon.'

It is more often the case that is dubious. 'If Caius is a European _he is white_, for all Europeans are white.' 'If Damon is in town _Pythias is in town_, for they are inseparable.' 'If I were you _I should defer the voyage to the summer season_, as I have always found winter travelling disagreeable.' But the word 'if' does not always mark a hypothetical thought. In the proposition, 'if children are neglected they will grow up ignorant,' we have a dogmatic or assertorial judgment--'neglected children grow up ignorant.' (Bain.)

The precedent may be suppressed in hypothetical as in dogmatic argument. 'If the crops are good, corn will be cheap' implies the unspoken precedent, 'good crops have been invariably followed by cheap corn.' 'If logic is useless it deserves to be neglected,' carries the mind to the more general thesis, 'all useless studies deserve to be neglected.' 'If Great Britain should be invaded the volunteers will be called out,' rests on the precedent judgment, 'it is the duty of the volunteer army to repel invaders.'

Arguments in which both applicate and case are hypothetical are so very dubious that they cannot be considered of any practical use. '_If_ opium is poisonous, and _if_ this substance is opium, you will be poisoned by taking this substance.'

The Aristotelian hypothetical is almost invariably a fallacy, sometimes on more than one account. It usually consists of--first, a conditional or doubtful statement; next, a solution of the doubt by means of positive information; finally and by way of inference the first statement is given without the doubt. Here is an example from Jevons: 'If the barometer is falling, bad weather is coming; but the barometer is falling; therefore bad weather is coming.'

Where did the information that the barometer is falling come from? If we knew it before uttering the first proposition, we were affecting an ignorance that did not exist. The second proposition takes away all occasion for argument; it is an amendment of the first proposition, and what we get from the theorem as a whole is a _case_, followed by a prediction for which there is no precedent justification. We are arguing in a circle.

'If Aristotle is right, slavery is a proper form of society; but slavery is not a proper form of society; therefore Aristotle is not right.' If we knew for certain (as the second proposition indicates) that slavery is not a proper form of society, what is the use or meaning of treating the question as hypothetical (as is done in the first)? If we acquired the information after uttering the first proposition, there was no occasion to go on with the argument; we should have said simply, 'Slavery is not a proper form of society, though Aristotle said it was.' It is needless, except for verbal completeness, to say 'he was not right'--we have _logically_ said so.

When two or more alternative data are presented, of which only one is valid or relevant to a proposed argument, but we know not at first which the valid datum is, we have the _dilemma_ (_trilemma_, _tetralemma_, &c.) of logicians. In such conditions we have a double process to go through; we must first settle by observation or by an auxiliary argument which of the alternative data to select, and then work out the principal argument in the regular dogmatic form.