An Essay In Aid Of A Grammar Of Assent Part 10

The first point to be ascertained, then, when we hear of a change of religious cert.i.tude in another, is, what the doctrines are on which his so-called cert.i.tude before now and at present has respectively fallen. All doctrines besides these were the accidents of his profession, and the indefectibility of cert.i.tude would not be disproved, though he changed them every year. There are few religions which have no points in common; and these, whether true or false, when embraced with an absolute conviction, are the pivots on which changes take place in that collection of credences, opinions, prejudices, and other a.s.sents, which make up what is called a man's selection and adoption of a form of religion, a denomination, or a Church. There have been Protestants whose idea of enlightened Christianity has been a strenuous antagonism to what they consider the unmanliness and unreasonableness of Catholic morality, an antipathy to the precepts of patience, meekness, forgiveness of injuries, and chast.i.ty. All this they have considered a woman's religion, the ornament of monks, of the sick, the feeble, and the old. l.u.s.t, revenge, ambition, courage, pride, these, they have fancied, made the man, and want of them the slave. No one could fairly accuse such men of any great change of their convictions, or refer to them in proof of the defectibility of cert.i.tude, if they were one day found to have taken up the profession of Islam.

And if this intercommunion of religions holds good, even when the common points between them are but errors held in common, much more natural will be the transition from one religion to another, without injury to existing cert.i.tudes, when the common points, the objects of those cert.i.tudes, are truths; and still stronger in that case and more constraining will be the sympathy, with which minds that love truth, even when they have surrounded it with error, will yearn towards the Catholic faith, which contains within itself, and claims as its own, all truth that is elsewhere to be found, and more than all, and nothing but truth. This is the secret of the influence, by which the Church draws to herself converts from such various and conflicting religions. They come, not to lose what they have, but to gain what they have not; and in order that, by means of what they have, more may be given to them. St. Augustine tells us that there is no false teaching without an intermixture of truth; and it is by the light of those particular truths, contained respectively in the various religions of men, and by our cert.i.tudes about them, which are possible wherever those truths are found, that we pick our way, slowly perhaps, but surely, into the One Religion which G.o.d has given, taking our cert.i.tudes with us, not to lose, but to keep them more securely, and to understand and love their objects more perfectly.

Not even are idolaters and heathen out of the range of some of these religious truths and their correlative cert.i.tudes. The old Greek and Roman polytheists had, as they show in their literature, clear and strong notions, nay, vivid mental images, of a Particular Providence, of the power of prayer, of the rule of Divine Governance, of the law of conscience, of sin and guilt, of expiation by means of sacrifices, and of future retribution: I will even add, of the Unity and Personality of the Supreme Being. This it is that throws such a magnificent light over the Homeric poems, the tragic choruses, and the Odes of Pindar; and it has its counterpart in the philosophy of Socrates and of the Stoics, and in such historians as Herodotus. It would be out of place to speak confidently of a state of society which has pa.s.sed away, but at first sight it does not appear why the truths which I have enumerated should not have received as genuine and deliberate an a.s.sent on the part of Socrates or Cleanthes, (of course with divine aids, but they do not enter into this discussion,) as was given to them by St. John or St. Paul, nay, an a.s.sent which rose to cert.i.tude. Much more safely may it be p.r.o.nounced of a Mahometan, that he may have a cert.i.tude of the Divine Unity, as well as a Christian; and of a Jew, that he may believe as truly as a Christian in the resurrection of the body; and of a Unitarian that he can give a deliberate and real a.s.sent to the fact of a supernatural revelation, to the Christian miracles, to the eternal moral law, and to the immortality of the soul. And so, again, a Protestant may, not only in words, but in mind and heart, hold, as if he were a Catholic, with simple cert.i.tude, the doctrines of the Holy Trinity, of the fall of man, of the need of regeneration, of the efficacy of Divine Grace, and of the possibility and danger of falling away. And thus it is conceivable that a man might travel in his religious profession all the way from heathenism to Catholicity, through Mahometanism, Judaism, Unitarianism, Protestantism, and Anglicanism, without any one cert.i.tude lost, but with a continual acc.u.mulation of truths, which claimed from him and elicited in his intellect fresh and fresh cert.i.tudes.

In saying all this, I do not forget that the same doctrines, as held in different religions, may be and often are held very differently, as belonging to distinct wholes or _forms_, as they are called, and exposed to the influence and the bias of the teaching, perhaps false, with which they are a.s.sociated. Thus, for instance, whatever be the resemblance between St. Augustine's doctrine of Predestination and the tenet of Calvin upon it, the two really differ from each other _toto clo_ in significance and effect, in consequence of the place they hold in the systems in which they are respectively incorporated, just as shades and tints show so differently in a painting according to the ma.s.ses of colour to which they are attached. But, in spite of this, a man may so hold the doctrine of personal election as a Calvinist, as to be able still to hold it as a Catholic.

However, I have been speaking of cert.i.tudes which remain unimpaired, or rather confirmed, by a change of religion; on the contrary there are others, whether we call them cert.i.tudes or convictions, which perish in the change, as St. Paul's conviction of the sufficiency of the Jewish Law came to an end on his becoming a Christian. Now how is such a series of facts to be reconciled with the doctrine which I have been enforcing? What conviction could be stronger than the faith of the Jews in the perpetuity of the Mosaic system? Those, then, it may be said, who abandoned Judaism for the Gospel, surely, in so doing, bore the most emphatic of testimonies to the defectibility of cert.i.tude. And, in like manner, a Mahometan may be so deeply convinced that Mahomet is the prophet of G.o.d, that it would be only by a quibble about the meaning of the word "cert.i.tude" that we could maintain, that, on his becoming a Catholic, he did not unequivocally prove that cert.i.tude is defectible. And it may be argued, perhaps, in the case of some members of the Church of England, that their faith in the validity of Anglican orders, and the invisibility of the Church's unity, is so absolute, so deliberate, that their abandonment of it, did they become Catholics or sceptics, would be tantamount to the abandonment of a cert.i.tude.

Now, in meeting this difficulty, I will not urge (lest I should be accused of quibbling), that cert.i.tude is a conviction of what is true, and that these so-called cert.i.tudes have come to nought, because, their objects being errors, not truths, they really were not cert.i.tudes at all; nor will I insist, as I might, that they ought to be proved first to be something more than mere prejudices, a.s.sents without reason and judgment, before they can fairly be taken as instances of the defectibility of cert.i.tude; but I simply ask, as regards the zeal of the Jews for the sufficiency of their law, (even though it implied genuine cert.i.tude, not a prejudice, not a mere conviction,) still was such zeal, such professed cert.i.tude, found in those who were eventually converted, or in those who were not; for, if those who had not that cert.i.tude became Christians and those who had it remained Jews, then loss of cert.i.tude in the latter is not instanced in the fact of the conversion of the former. St. Paul certainly is an exception, but his conversion, as also his after-life, was miraculous; ordinarily speaking, it was not the zealots who supplied members to the Catholic Church, but those "men of good will," who, instead of considering the law as perfect and eternal, "looked for the redemption of Israel," and for "the knowledge of salvation in the remission of sins." And, in like manner, as to those learned and devout men among the Anglicans at the present day, who come so near the Church without acknowledging her claims, I ask whether there are not two cla.s.ses among them also,-those who are looking out beyond their own body for the perfect way, and those on the other hand who teach that the Anglican communion is the golden mean between men who believe too much and men who believe too little, the centre of unity to which East and West are destined to gravitate, the instrument and the mould, as the Jews might think of their own moribund inst.i.tutions, through which the kingdom of Christ is to be established all over the earth. And next I would ask, which of these two cla.s.ses supplies converts to the Church; for if they come from among those who never professed to be quite certain of the special strength of the Anglican position, such men cannot be quoted as instances of the defectibility of cert.i.tude.

There is indeed another cla.s.s of beliefs, of which I must take notice, the failure of which may be taken at first sight as a proof that cert.i.tude may be lost. Yet they clearly deserve no other name than prejudices, as being founded upon reports of facts, or on arguments, which will not bear careful examination. Such was the disgust felt towards our predecessors in primitive times, the Christians of the first centuries, as a secret society, as a conspiracy against the civil power, as a set of mean, sordid, despicable fanatics, as monsters revelling in blood and impurity.

Such also is the deep prejudice now existing against the Church among Protestants, who dress her up in the most hideous and loathsome images, which rightly attach, in the prophetic descriptions, to the evil spirit, his agents and instruments. And so of the numberless calumnies directed against individual Catholics, against our religious bodies, and men in authority, which serve to feed and sustain the suspicion and dislike with which everything Catholic is regarded in this country. But as a persistence in such prejudices is no evidence of their truth, so an abandonment of them is no evidence that cert.i.tude can fail.

There is yet another cla.s.s of prejudices against the Catholic Religion, which is far more tolerable and intelligible than those on which I have been dwelling, but still in no sense cert.i.tudes. Indeed, I doubt whether they would be considered more than presumptive opinions by the persons who entertain them. Such is the idea which has possessed certain philosophers, ancient and modern, that miracles are an infringement and disfigurement of the beautiful order of nature. Such, too, is the persuasion, common among political and literary men, that the Catholic Church is inconsistent with the true interests of the human race, with social progress, with rational freedom, with good government. A renunciation of these imaginations is not a change in cert.i.tudes.

So much on this subject. All concrete laws are general, and persons, as such, do not fall under laws. Still, I have gone a good way, as I think, to remove the objections to the doctrine of the indefectibility of cert.i.tude in matters of religion.

6.

One further remark may be made. Cert.i.tude does not admit of an interior, immediate test, sufficient to discriminate it from false cert.i.tude. Such a test is rendered impossible from the circ.u.mstance that, when we make the mental act expressed by "I know," we sum up the whole series of reflex judgments which might, each in turn, successively exercise a critical function towards those of the series which precede it. But still, if it is the general rule that cert.i.tude is indefectible, will not that indefectibility itself become at least in the event a criterion of the genuineness of the cert.i.tude? or is there any rival state or habit of the intellect, which claims to be indefectible also? A few words will suffice to answer these questions.

Premising that all rules are but general, especially those which relate to the mind, I observe that indefectibility may at least serve as a negative test of cert.i.tude, or _sine qua non_ condition, so that whoever loses his conviction on a given point is thereby proved not to have been certain of it. Cert.i.tude ought to stand all trials, or it is not cert.i.tude. Its very office is to cherish and maintain its object, and its very lot and duty is to sustain rude shocks in maintenance of it without being damaged by them.

I will take an example. Let us suppose we are told on an unimpeachable authority, that a man whom we saw die is now alive again and at his work, as it was his wont to be; let us suppose we actually see him and converse with him; what will become of our cert.i.tude of his death? I do not think we should give it up; how could we, when we actually saw him die? At first, indeed, we should be thrown into an astonishment and confusion so great, that the world would seem to reel round us, and we should be ready to give up the use of our senses and of our memory, of our reflective powers, and of our reason, and even to deny our power of thinking, and our existence itself. Such confidence have we in the doctrine that when life goes it never returns. Nor would our bewilderment be less, when the first blow was over; but our reason would rally, and with our reason our cert.i.tude would come back to us. Whatever came of it, we should never cease to know and to confess to ourselves both of the contrary facts, that we saw him die, and that after dying we saw him alive again. The overpowering strangeness of our experience would have no power to shake our cert.i.tude in the facts which created it.

Again, let us suppose, for argument's sake, that ethnologists, philologists, anatomists, and antiquarians agreed together in separate demonstrations that there were half a dozen races of men, and that they were all descended from gorillas, or chimpanzees, or ourang-outangs, or baboons; moreover, that Adam was an historical personage, with a well-ascertained dwelling-place, surroundings and date, in a comparatively modern world. On the other hand, let me believe that the Word of G.o.d Himself distinctly declares that there were no men before Adam, that he was immediately made out of the slime of the earth, and that he is the first father of all men that are or ever have been. Here is a contradiction of statements more direct than in the former instance; the two cannot stand together; one or other of them is untrue. But whatever means I might be led to take, for making, if possible, the antagonism tolerable, I conceive I should never give up my cert.i.tude in that truth which on sufficient grounds I determined to come from heaven. If I so believed, I should not pretend to argue, or to defend myself to others; I should be patient; I should look for better days; but I should still believe. If, indeed, I had hitherto only half believed, if I believed with an a.s.sent short of cert.i.tude, or with an acquiescence short of a.s.sent, or hastily or on light grounds, then the case would be altered; but if, after full consideration, and availing myself of my best lights, I did think that beyond all question G.o.d spoke as I thought He did, philosophers and experimentalists might take their course for me,-I should consider that they and I thought and reasoned in different mediums, and that my cert.i.tude was as little in collision with them or damaged by them, as if they attempted to counteract in some great matter chemical action by the force of gravity, or to weigh magnetic influence against capillary attraction. Of course, I am putting an impossible case, for philosophical discoveries cannot really contradict divine revelation.

So much on the indefectibility of cert.i.tude; as to the question whether any other a.s.sent is indefectible besides it, I think prejudice may be such; but it cannot be confused with cert.i.tude, for the one is an a.s.sent previous to rational grounds, and the other an a.s.sent given expressly after careful examination.

It seems then that on the whole there are three conditions of cert.i.tude: that it follows on investigation and proof, that it is accompanied by a specific sense of intellectual satisfaction and repose, and that it is irreversible. If the a.s.sent is made without rational grounds, it is a rash judgment, a fancy, or a prejudice; if without the sense of finality, it is scarcely more than an inference; if without permanence, it is a mere conviction.

Chapter VIII. Inference.

-- 1. Formal Inference.

Inference is the conditional acceptance of a proposition, a.s.sent is the unconditional; the object of a.s.sent is a truth, the object of Inference is the truth-like or a verisimilitude. The problem which I have undertaken is that of ascertaining how it comes to pa.s.s that a conditional act leads to an unconditional; and, having now shown that a.s.sent really is unconditional, I proceed to show how inferential exercises, as such, always must be conditional.

We reason, when we hold this by virtue of that; whether we hold it as evident or as approximating or tending to be evident, in either case we so hold it because of holding something else to be evident or tending to be evident. In the next place, our reasoning ordinarily presents itself to our mind as a simple act, not a process or series of acts. We apprehend the antecedent and then apprehend the consequent, without explicit recognition of the medium connecting the two, as if by a sort of direct a.s.sociation of the first thought with the second. We proceed by a sort of instinctive perception, from premiss to conclusion. I call it instinctive, not as if the faculty were one and the same to all men in strength and quality (as we generally conceive of instinct), but because ordinarily, or at least often, it acts by a spontaneous impulse, as prompt and inevitable as the exercise of sense and memory. We perceive external objects, and we remember past events, without knowing how we do so; and in like manner we reason without effort and intention, or any necessary consciousness of the path which the mind takes in pa.s.sing from antecedent to conclusion.

Such is ratiocination, in what may be called a state of nature, as it is found in the uneducated,-nay, in all men, in its ordinary exercise; nor is there any antecedent ground for determining that it will not be as correct in its informations as it is instinctive, as trustworthy as are sensible perception and memory, though its informations are not so immediate and have a wider range. By means of sense we gain knowledge directly; by means of reasoning we gain it indirectly, that is, by virtue of a previous knowledge. And if we may justly regard the universe, according to the meaning of the word, as one whole, we may also believe justly that to know one part of it is necessarily to know much more than that one part. This thought leads us to a further view of ratiocination. The proverb says, "Ex pede Herculem;" and we have actual experience how the practised zoologist can build up some intricate organization from the sight of its smallest bone, evoking the whole as if it were a remembrance; how, again, a philosophical antiquarian, by means of an inscription, interprets the mythical traditions of former ages, and makes the past live; and how a Columbus is led, from considerations which are common property, and fortuitous phenomena which are successively brought to his notice, to have such faith in a western world, as willingly to commit himself to the terrors of a mysterious ocean in order to arrive at it. That which the mind is able thus variously to bring together into unity, must have some real intrinsic connexion of part with part. But if this _summa rerum_ is thus one whole, it must be constructed on definite principles and laws, the knowledge of which will enlarge our capacity of reasoning about it in particulars;-thus we are led on to aim at determining on a large scale and on system, what even gifted or practised intellects are only able by their own personal vigour to reach piece-meal and fitfully, that is, at subst.i.tuting scientific methods, such as all may use, for the action of individual genius.

There is another reason for attempting to discover an instrument of reasoning (that is, of gaining new truths by means of old), which may be less vague and arbitrary than the talent and experience of the few or the common-sense of the many. As memory is not always accurate, and has on that account led to the adoption of writing, as being a _memoria technica_, unaffected by the failure of mental impressions,-as our senses at times deceive us, and have to be corrected by each other; so is it also with our reasoning faculty. The conclusions of one man are not the conclusions of another; those of the same man do not always agree together; those of ever so many who agree together may differ from the facts themselves, which those conclusions are intended to ascertain. In consequence it becomes a necessity, if it be possible, to a.n.a.lyze the process of reasoning, and to invent a method which may act as a common measure between mind and mind, as a means of joint investigation, and as a recognized intellectual standard,-a standard such as to secure us against hopeless mistakes, and to emanc.i.p.ate us from the capricious _ipse dixit_ of authority.

As the index on the dial notes down the sun's course in the heavens, as a key, revolving through the intricate wards of the lock, opens for us a treasure-house, so let us, if we can, provide ourselves with some ready expedient to serve as a true record of the system of objective truth, and an available rule for interpreting its phenomena; or at least let us go as far as we can in providing it. One such experimental key is the science of geometry, which, in a certain department of nature, subst.i.tutes a collection of true principles, fruitful and interminable in consequences, for the guesses, _pro re nata_, of our intellect, and saves it both the labour and the risk of guessing. Another far more subtle and effective instrument is algebraical science, which acts as a spell in unlocking for us, without merit or effort of our own individually, the _arcana_ of the concrete physical universe. A more ambitious, because a more comprehensive contrivance still, for interpreting the concrete world is the method of logical inference. What we desiderate is something which may supersede the need of personal gifts by a far-reaching and infallible rule. Now, without external symbols to mark out and to steady its course, the intellect runs wild; but with the aid of symbols, as in algebra, it advances with precision and effect. Let then our symbols be words: let all thought be arrested and embodied in words. Let language have a monopoly of thought; and thought go for only so much as it can show itself to be worth in language. Let every prompting of the intellect be ignored, every _momentum_ of argument be disowned, which is unprovided with an equivalent wording, as its ticket for sharing in the common search after truth. Let the authority of nature, common-sense, experience, genius, go for nothing.

Ratiocination, thus restricted and put into grooves, is what I have called Inference, and the science, which is its regulating principle, is Logic.

The first step in the inferential method is to throw the question to be decided into the form of a proposition; then to throw the proof itself into propositions, the force of the proof lying in the comparison of these propositions with each other. When the a.n.a.lysis is carried out fully and put into form, it becomes the Aristotelic syllogism. However, an inference need not be expressed thus technically; an enthymeme fulfils the requirements of what I have called Inference. So does any other form of words with the mere grammatical expressions, "for," "therefore,"

"supposing," "so that," "similarly," and the like. Verbal reasoning, of whatever kind, as opposed to mental, is what I mean by inference, which differs from logic only inasmuch as logic is its scientific form. And it will be more convenient here to use the two words indiscriminately, for I snail say nothing about logic which does not in its substance also apply to inference.

Logical inference, then, being such, and its office such as I have described, the question follows, how far it answers the purpose for which it is used. It proposes to provide both a test and a common measure of reasoning; and I think it will be found partly to succeed and partly to fail; succeeding so far as words can in fact be found for representing the countless varieties and subtleties of human thought, failing on account of the fallacy of the original a.s.sumption, that whatever can be thought can be adequately expressed in words.

In the first place, Inference, being conditional, is hampered with other propositions besides that which is especially its own, that is, with the premisses as well as the conclusion, and with the rules connecting the latter with the former. It views its own proper proposition in the medium of prior propositions, and measures it by them. It does not hold a proposition for its own sake, but as dependent upon others, and those others it entertains for the sake of the conclusion. Thus it is practically far more concerned with the comparison of propositions, than with the propositions themselves. It is obliged to regard all the propositions, with which it has to do, not so much for their own sake, as for the sake of each other, as regards the ident.i.ty or likeness, independence or dissimilarity, which has to be mutually predicated of them. It follows from this, that the more simple and definite are the words of a proposition, and the narrower their meaning, and the more that meaning in each proposition is restricted to the relation which it has to the words of the other propositions compared with it,-in other words, the nearer the propositions concerned in the inference approach to being mental abstractions, and the less they have to do with the concrete reality, and the more closely they are made to express exact, intelligible, comprehensible, communicable notions, and the less they stand for objective things, that is, the more they are the subjects, not of real, but of notional apprehension,-so much the more suitable do they become for the purposes of Inference.

Hence it is that no process of argument is so perfect, as that which is conducted by means of symbols. In Arithmetic 1 is 1, and just 1, and never anything else but 1; it never is 2, it has no tendency to change its meaning, and to become 2; it has no portion, quality, admixture of 2 in its meaning. And 6 under all circ.u.mstances is 3 times 2, and the sum of 2 and 4; nor can the whole world supply anything to throw doubt upon these elementary positions. It is not so with language. Take, by contrast, the word "inference," which I have been using: it may stand for the act of inferring, as I have used it; or for the connecting principle, or _inferentia_, between premisses and conclusions; or for the conclusion itself. And sometimes it will be difficult, in a particular sentence, to say which it bears of these three senses. And so again in Algebra, _a_ is never _x_, or anything but _a_, wherever it is found; and _a_ and _b_ are always standard quant.i.ties, to which _x_ and _y_ are always to be referred, and by which they are always to be measured. In Geometry again, the subjects of argument, points, lines, and surfaces, are precise creations of the mind, suggested indeed by external objects, but meaning nothing but what they are defined to mean: they have no colour, no motion, no heat, no qualities which address themselves to the ear or to the palate; so that, in whatever combinations or relations the words denoting them occur, and to whomsoever they come, those words never vary in their meaning, but are just of the same measure and weight at one time and at another.

What is true of Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry, is true also of Aristotelic argumentation in its typical modes and figures. It compares two given words separately with a third, and then determines how they stand towards each other, in a _bona fide_ ident.i.ty of sense. In consequence, its formal process is best conducted by means of symbols, A, B, and C. While it keeps to these, it is safe; it has the cogency of mathematical reasoning, and draws its conclusions by a rule as unerring as it is blind.

Symbolical notation, then, being the perfection of the syllogistic method, it follows that, when words are subst.i.tuted for symbols, it will be its aim to circ.u.mscribe and stint their import as much as possible, lest perchance A should not always exactly mean A, and B mean B; and to make them, as much as possible, the _calculi_ of notions, which are in our absolute power, as meaning just what we choose them to mean, and as little as possible the tokens of real things, which are outside of us, and which mean we do not know how much, but so much certainly as may run away with us, in proportion as we enter into them, beyond the range of scientific management. The concrete matter of propositions is a constant source of trouble to syllogistic reasoning, as marring the simplicity and perfection of its process. Words, which denote things, have innumerable implications; but in inferential exercises it is the very triumph of that clearness and hardness of head, which is the characteristic talent for the art, to have stripped them of all these connatural senses, to have drained them of that depth and breadth of a.s.sociations which const.i.tute their poetry, their rhetoric, and their historical life, to have starved each term down till it has become the ghost of itself, and everywhere one and the same ghost, "omnibus umbra locis," so that it may stand for just one unreal aspect of the concrete thing to which it properly belongs, for a relation, a generalization, or other abstraction, for a notion neatly turned out of the laboratory of the mind, and sufficiently tame and subdued, because existing only in a definition.

Thus it is that the logician for his own purposes, and most usefully as far as those purposes are concerned, turns rivers, full, winding, and beautiful, into navigable ca.n.a.ls. To him dog or horse is not a thing which he sees, but a mere name suggesting ideas; and by dog or horse universal he means, not the aggregate of all individual dogs or horses brought together, but a common aspect, meagre but precise, of all existing or possible dogs or horses, which all the while does not really correspond to any one single dog or horse out of the whole aggregate. Such minute fidelity in the representation of individuals is neither necessary nor possible to his art; his business is not to ascertain facts in the concrete, but to find and dress up middle terms; and, provided they and the extremes which they go between are not equivocal, either in themselves or in their use, and he can enable his pupils to show well in a _viva voce_ disputation, or in a popular harangue, or in a written dissertation, he has achieved the main purpose of his profession.

Such are the characteristics of reasoning, viewed as a science or scientific art, or inferential process, and we might antic.i.p.ate that, narrow as by necessity is its field of view, for that reason its pretensions to be demonstrative were incontrovertible. In a certain sense they really are so; while we talk logic, we are unanswerable; but then, on the other hand, this universal living scene of things is after all as little a logical world as it is a poetical; and, as it cannot without violence be exalted into poetical perfection, neither can it be attenuated into a logical formula. Abstract can only conduct to abstract; but we have need to attain by our reasonings to what is concrete; and the margin between the abstract conclusions of the science, and the concrete facts which we wish to ascertain, will be found to reduce the force of the inferential method from demonstration to the mere determination of the probable. Thus, whereas (as I have already said) Inference starts with conditions, as starting with premisses, here are two reasons why, when employed upon matters of fact, it can only conclude probabilities: first, because its premisses are a.s.sumed, not proved; and secondly, because its conclusions are abstract, and not concrete. I will now consider these two points separately.

1.

Inference comes short of proof in concrete matters, because it has not a full command over the objects to which it relates, but merely a.s.sumes its premisses. In order to complete the proof, we are thrown upon some previous syllogism or syllogisms, in which the a.s.sumptions may be proved; and then, still farther back, we are thrown upon others again, to prove the new a.s.sumptions of that second order of syllogisms. Where is this process to stop? especially since it must run upon separated, divergent, and multiplied lines of argument, the farther the investigation is carried back. At length a score of propositions present themselves, all to be proved by propositions more evident than themselves, in order to enable them respectively to become premisses to that series of inferences which terminates in the conclusion which we originally drew. But even now the difficulty is not at an end; it would be something to arrive at length at premisses which are undeniable, however long we might be in arriving at them; but in this case the long retrospection lodges us at length at what are called first principles, the recondite sources of all knowledge, as to which logic provides no common measure of minds,-which are accepted by some, rejected by others,-in which, and not in the syllogistic exhibitions, lies the whole problem of attaining to truth,-and which are called self-evident by their respective advocates because they are evident in no other way. One of the two uses contemplated in reasoning by rule, or in verbal argumentation, was, as I have said, to establish a standard of truth and to supersede the _ipse dixit_ of authority: how does it fulfil this end, if it only leads us back to first principles, about which there is interminable controversy? We are not able to prove by syllogism that there are any self-evident propositions at all; but supposing there are (as of course I hold there are), still who can determine these by logic?

Syllogism, then, though of course it has its use, still does only the minutest and easiest part of the work, in the investigation of truth, for when there is any difficulty, that difficulty commonly lies in determining first principles, not in the arrangement of proofs.

Even when argument is the most direct and severe of its kind, there must be those a.s.sumptions in the process which resolve themselves into the conditions of human nature; but how many more a.s.sumptions does that process in ordinary concrete matters involve, subtle a.s.sumptions not directly arising out of these primary conditions, but accompanying the course of reasoning, step by step, and traceable to the sentiments of the age, country, religion, social habits and ideas, of the particular inquirers or disputants, and pa.s.sing current without detection, because admitted equally on all hands! And to these must be added the a.s.sumptions which are made from the necessity of the case, in consequence of the prolixity and elaborateness of any argument which should faithfully note down all the propositions which go to make it up. We recognize this tediousness even in the case of the theorems of Euclid, though mathematical proof is comparatively simple.

Logic then does not really prove; it enables us to join issue with others; it suggests ideas; it opens views; it maps out for us the lines of thought; it verifies negatively; it determines when differences of opinion are hopeless; and when and how far conclusions are probable; but for genuine proof in concrete matter we require an _organon_ more delicate, versatile, and elastic than verbal argumentation.

I ought to give an ill.u.s.tration of what I have been stating in general terms; but it is difficult to do so without a digression. However, if it must be, I look round the room in which I happen to be writing, and take down the first book which catches my eye. It is an old volume of a Magazine of great name; I open it at random and fall upon a discussion about the then lately discovered emendations of the text of Shakespeare.

It will do for my purpose.

In the account of Falstaff's death in "Henry V." (act ii. scene 3) we read, according to the received text, the well-known words, "His nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled of green fields." In the first authentic edition, published in 1623, some years after Shakespeare's death, the words, I believe, ran, "and a table of green fields," which has no sense.

Accordingly, an anonymous critic, reported by Theobald in the last century, corrected them to "and 'a talked of green fields," Theobald himself improved the reading into "and 'a babbled of green fields," which since his time has been the received text. But just twenty years ago an annotated copy of the edition of 1632 was found, annotated perhaps by a contemporary, which, among as many as 20,000 corrections of the text, subst.i.tuted for the corrupt reading of 1623, the words "on a table of green frieze," which has a sufficient sense, though far less acceptable to an admirer of Shakespeare, than Theobald's. The genuineness of this copy with its annotations, as it is presented to us, I shall here take for granted.

Now I understand, or at least will suppose, the argument, maintained in the article of the Magazine in question, to run thus:-"Theobald's reading, as at present received, is to be retained, to the exclusion of the text of 1623 and of the emendation made on the copy of the edition of 1632;-to the exclusion of the text of 1623 because that text is corrupt; to the exclusion of the annotation of 1632 because it is anonymous." I wish it then observed how many large questions are opened in the discussion which ensues, how many recondite and untractable principles have to be settled, and how impotent is logic, or any reasonings which can be thrown into language, to deal with these indispensable first principles.

The first position is, "The authoritative reading of 1623 is not to be restored to the received text, because it is corrupt." Now are we to take it for granted, as a first principle, which needs no proof, that a text may be tampered with, because it is corrupt? However the corrupt reading arose, it is authoritative. It is found in an edition, published by known persons, only six years after Shakespeare's death, from his own ma.n.u.script, as it appears, and with his corrections of earlier faulty impressions. Authority cannot sanction nonsense, but it can forbid critics from experimentalizing upon it. If the text of Shakespeare is corrupt, it should be published as corrupt.

I believe the best editors of the Greek tragedians have given up the impertinence of introducing their conjectures into the text; and a cla.s.sic like Shakespeare has a right to be treated with the same respect as aeschylus. To this it will be replied, that Shakespeare is for the general public and aeschylus for students of a dead language; that the run of men read for amus.e.m.e.nt or as a recreation, and that, if the editions of Shakespeare were made on critical principles, they would remain unsold.

Here, then, we are brought to the question whether it is any advantage to read Shakespeare except with the care and pains which a cla.s.sic demands, and whether he is in fact read at all by those whom such critical exactness would offend; and thus we are led on to further questions about cultivation of mind and the education of the ma.s.ses. Further, the question presents itself, whether the general admiration of Shakespeare is genuine, whether it is not a mere fashion, whether the mult.i.tude of men understand him at all, whether it is not true that every one makes much of him, because every one else makes much of him. Can we possibly make Shakespeare light reading, especially in this day of cheap novels, by ever so much correction of his text?

Now supposing this point settled, and the text of 1623 put out of court, then comes the claim of the Annotator to introduce into Shakespeare's text the emendation made upon his copy of the edition of 1632; why is he not of greater authority than Theobald, the inventor of the received reading, and his emendation of more authority than Theobald's? If the corrupt reading must any how be got out of the way, why should not the Annotator, rather than Theobald, determine its subst.i.tute? For what we know, the authority of the anonymous Annotator may be very great. There is nothing to show that he was not a contemporary of the poet; and if so, the question arises, what is the character of his emendations? are they his own private and arbitrary conjectures, or are they informations from those who knew Shakespeare, traditions of the theatre, of the actors or spectators of his plays? Here, then, we are involved in intricate questions which can only be decided by a minute examination of the 20,000 emendations so industriously brought together by this anonymous critic. But it is obvious that a verbal argumentation upon 20,000 corrections is impossible: there must be first careful processes of perusal, cla.s.sification, discrimination, selection, which mainly are acts of the mind without the intervention of language. There must be a c.u.mulation of arguments on one side and on the other, of which only the heads or the results can be put upon paper. Next come in questions of criticism and taste, with their recondite and disputable premisses, and the usual deductions from them, so subtle and difficult to follow. All this being considered, am I wrong in saying that, though controversy is both possible and useful at all times, yet it is not adequate to this occasion; rather that that sum-total of argument (whether for or against the Annotator) which is furnished by his numerous emendations,-or what may be called the multiform, evidential fact, in which the examination of these emendations results,-requires rather to be photographed on the individual mind as by one impression, than admits of delineation for the satisfaction of the many in any known or possible language, however rich in vocabulary and flexible in structure?

And now as to the third point which presents itself for consideration, the claim of Theobald's emendation to retain its place in the _textus receptus_. It strikes me with wonder that an argument in its defence could have been put forward to the following effect, viz. that true though it be, that the Editors of 1623 are of much more authority than Theobald, and that the Annotator's reading in the pa.s.sage in question is more likely to be correct than Theobald's, nevertheless Theobald's has by this time acquired a prescriptive right to its place there, the prescription of more than a hundred years;-that usurpation has become legitimacy; that Theobald's words have sunk into the hearts of thousands; that in fact they have become Shakespeare's; that it would be a dangerous innovation and an evil precedent to touch them. If we begin an unsettlement of the popular mind, where is it to stop?

Thus it appears, in order to do justice to the question before us, we have to betake ourselves to the consideration of myths, pious frauds, and other grave matters, which introduce us into a _sylva_, dense and intricate, of first principles and elementary phenomena, belonging to the domains of archeology and theology. Nor is this all; when such views of the duty of garbling a cla.s.sic are propounded, they open upon us a long vista of sceptical interrogations which go far to disparage the claims upon us, the genius, the very existence of the great poet to whose honour these views are intended to minister. For perhaps, after all, Shakespeare is really but a collection of many Theobalds, who have each of them a right to his own share of him. There was a great dramatic school in his day; he was one of a number of first-rate artists,-perhaps they wrote in common. How are we to know what is his, or how much? Are the best parts his, or the worst?