Page:System of Logic.djvu/469

 which distinguishes them from all other things, but agree with each other and differ from other things in the very circumstances which are of primary importance for the purpose (theoretical or practical) which we have in view, and which constitutes the problem before us. In other words, our conceptions, though they may be clear, are not appropriate for our purpose, unless the properties we comprise in them are those which will help us toward what we wish to understand--i.e., either those which go deepest into the nature of the things, if our object be to understand that, or those which are most closely connected with the particular property which we are endeavoring to investigate.

We can not, therefore, frame good general conceptions beforehand. That the conception we have obtained is the one we want, can only be known when we have done the work for the sake of which we wanted it; when we completely understand the general character of the phenomena, or the conditions of the particular property with which we concern ourselves. General conceptions formed without this thorough knowledge, are Bacon's "notiones temerè à rebus abstractæ." Yet such premature conceptions we must be continually making up, in our progress to something better. They are an impediment to the progress of knowledge, only when they are permanently acquiesced in. When it has become our habit to group things in wrong classes--in groups which either are not really classes, having no distinctive points of agreement (absence of clear ideas), or which are not classes of which any thing important to our purpose can be predicated (absence of appropriate ideas); and when, in the belief that these badly made classes are those sanctioned by nature, we refuse to exchange them for others, and can not or will not make up our general conceptions from any other elements; in that case all the evils which Bacon ascribes to his "notiones temerè abstractæ" really occur. This was what the ancients did in physics, and what the world in general does in morals and politics to the present day.

It would thus, in my view of the matter, be an inaccurate mode of expression to say, that obtaining appropriate conceptions is a condition precedent to generalization. Throughout the whole process of comparing phenomena with one another for the purpose of generalization, the mind is trying to make up a conception; but the conception which it is trying to make up is that of the really important point of agreement in the phenomena. As we obtain more knowledge of the phenomena themselves, and of the conditions on which their important properties depend, our views on this subject naturally alter; and thus we advance from a less to a more "appropriate" general conception, in the progress of our investigations.

We ought not, at the same time, to forget that the really important agreement can not always be discovered by mere comparison of the very phenomena in question, without the aid of a conception acquired elsewhere; as in the case, so often referred to, of the planetary orbits.

The search for the agreement of a set of phenomena is in truth very similar to the search for a lost or hidden object. At first we place ourselves in a sufficiently commanding position, and cast our eyes round us, and if we can see the object it is well; if not, we ask ourselves mentally what are the places in which it may be hid, in order that we may there search for it: and so on, until we imagine the place where it really is. And here too we require to have had a previous conception, or knowledge, of those different places. As in this familiar process, so in the philosophical operation which it illustrates, we first endeavor to find the lost object or