Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III The Essentials Of Induction We now proceed to a more precise determination of the nature of induction. Its point of view in all reasoning regards concrete instances. They are the data, and from them general propositions are to . result The procedure is from given facts to laws which are the ground and explanation of these facts. We are here, however, at once struck with the evident break in the course of our reasoning. Procedure from the particular to the universal cannot be a continuous process. There is a gap somewhere. The conclusion contains more than the premises. In deduction, we are proceeding from the greater to the less, and we experience no violation of our logical sense; but at once we appreciate the difficulty which attends the reverse process, from the less to the greater. Here we soon reach a point where we pass beyond the sphere of our experience to the generalization which necessarily embraces far more than our experience. This is the so-called inductive leap; or it is sometimes referred to as the . inductive hazard. But is this a leap in the dark ? a wild guess concerning all that lies beyond the sensuous sphere of our immediate experience ? This 24 would be the case, were we compelled to use the mere data of experience as solo ground for our inferences. John Stuart Mill insists that nothing whatever is given in consciousness but particular sensations, and these are but subjective states of feeling, and with no assurance of any definite correspondence with the external world. ] With such . purely empirical data it is impossible to proceed to truths of universal validity. It is necessary to postulate some universal truth which the mind through strictly a priori considerations is constrained to formulate, and which will serve to bridge the gulf be...
Synopsis
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