§ 1. It does not belong to the present undertaking to dwell on the importance of language as a medium of human intercourse, whether for purposes of sympathy or of information. Nor does our design admit of more than a passing allusion to that great property of names, on which their functions as an intellectual instrument are, in reality, ultimately dependent; their potency as a means of forming, and of riveting, associations among our other ideas; a subject on which an able thinker1 has thus written:
“Names are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold on the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when passed might be dissipated forever, are, by their connection with language, always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves, are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment. Words are the custodiers of every product of mind less impressive than themselves. All extensions of human knowledge, all new generalizations, are fixed and spread, even unintentionally, by the use of words. The child growing up learns, along with the vocables of his mother-tongue, that things which he would have believed to be different are, in important points, the same. Without any formal instruction, the language in which we grow up teaches us all the common philosophy of the age. It directs us to observe and know things which we should have overlooked; it supplies us with classifications ready made, by which things are arranged (as far as the light of by-gone generations admits) with the objects to which they bear the greatest total resemblance. The number of general names in a language, and the degree of [pg 465] generality of those names, afford a test of the knowledge of the era, and of the intellectual insight which is the birthright of any one born into it.”
It is not, however, of the functions of Names, considered generally, that we have here to treat, but only of the manner and degree in which they are directly instrumental to the investigation of truth; in other words, to the process of induction.
§ 2. Observation and Abstraction, the operations which formed the subject of the two foregoing chapters, are conditions indispensable to induction; there can be no induction where they are not. It has been imagined that Naming is also a condition equally indispensable. There are thinkers who have held that language is not solely, according to a phrase generally current, an instrument of thought, but the instrument; that names, or something equivalent to them, some species of artificial signs, are necessary to reasoning; that there could be no inference, and consequently no induction, without them. But if the nature of reasoning was correctly explained in the earlier part of the present work, this opinion must be held to be an exaggeration, though of an important truth. If reasoning be from particulars to particulars, and if it consist in recognizing one fact as a mark of another, or a mark of a mark of another, nothing is required to render reasoning possible, except senses and association; senses to perceive that two facts are conjoined; association, as the law by which one of those two facts raises up the idea of the other.2 For these mental phenomena, as well as for the belief or expectation which follows, and by which we recognize as having taken place, or as about to take place, that of which we have perceived a mark, there is evidently no need of language. And this inference of one particular fact from another is a case of induction. It is of this sort of induction that brutes are capable; it is in this shape that uncultivated minds make almost all their inductions, and that we all do so in the cases in which familiar experience forces our conclusions upon us without any active process of