Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/518

 504 W. JEFFEEY WHITE I relation to action seems to be most consciously done when one is a beginner or lacks skill in the department of action in question. With skill or experience the process is less and less consciously gone through. Great skill or great experience probably leads to almost instinctive judgment. Practical suppositions belong to the intellectual aspect of action. It is not intended to overemphasise this aspect. Energy and decisiveness, for example, tell more perhaps in action than insight. Even when insight is fully present, the life of action involves a great many leaps in the dark : the data for insight to work on are often wanting, it is a mere chance whether the event be brilliant success or disastrous failure. Life is only in part a game of skill, chance has always to be reckoned with, even when the game is most quietly played. The courage to play for great stakes is an element in greatness, but often it has no more to do with intellect than the gambler's cast of a die. In giving an account of practical suppositions in relation to action, it may be well to notice a limitation to their availability on theoretical grounds in certain cases in which their use might otherwise seem appropriate. In moral action on the doctrine that morality is intrinsic, and not dependent on consequences, practical suppositions ought not to determine conduct. But admittedly on this theory of ethics, morality leaves many things indeterminate, and in relation to them appeal to expediency is legitimate. No one, as has been pointed out, can say that consequences are irrele- vant in ethics who allows, as all intuitionists do, that prudence is a cardinal virtue. Not only so, but intuitional moralists allow that outside the class of cases where action may be legitimately guided by expediency, and even where consequences do not determine morality, they may rightly be used as a test of the intrinsic character of action, when the direct determination of the intrinsic character presents difficulties. By their fruits you shall know them is a principle, though not the principle of intuitional morality. Taking up next suppositions that are made for the attain- ment of truth suppositions that are means in relation to the end, truth. A supposition of this sort has a well-recognised name of its own : it is called a hypothesis. Hypotheses may be divided into two classes on an important principle of division pointed out by Mr. Venn in his Eminrical Logic. In knowledge of truth there may be advance in either of two ways, as a logician would say, by way of extension or by way of intension. To put the same thing less technically, advance in truth may be made by addition, i.e., knowing more, or realisation, i.e., knowing better. Hypotheses directed towards the realisation of truth are called by Mr. Venn, Illustrative. Hypotheses directed towards the discovery of truth are called by Mr. Venn, Constructive. Illustrative hypotheses deal with the application of known principles. They are used in teaching ourselves or others the