§ 2. One subdivision of this enquiry is however really forced upon our notice. It does become important to consider the restrictions to which the ultra-material account of the province of Logic has to be subjected, because we shall thus have our attention drawn to an aspect of the subject which, slight and fleeting as it is within the region of Induction becomes very prominent and comparatively permanent in that of Probability. According to this ultra-material view, Inductive Logic would generally be considered to have nothing to do with anything but objective facts: its duty is to start from facts and to confine itself to such methods as will yield nothing but facts. What is doubtful it either establishes or it lets alone for the present, what is unattainable it rejects, and in this way it proceeds to build up by slow accretion a vast fabric of certain knowledge.
But of course all this is supposed to be done by human minds, and therefore if we enquire whether notions or concepts,—call them what we will,—have no place in such a scheme it must necessarily be admitted that they have some place. The facts which form our starting point must be grasped by an intelligent being before inference can be built upon them; and the ‘facts’ which form the conclusion have often, at any rate for some time, no place anywhere else than in the mind of man. But no one can read Mill's treatise, for instance, without noticing how slight is his reference to this aspect of the question. He remarks, in almost contemptuous indifference, that the man who digs must of course have a notion of the ground he digs and of the spade he puts into it, but he evidently considers that these ‘notions’ need not much more occupy the attention of the speculative logician, in so far as his mere inferences are concerned, than they occupy that of the husbandman.
§ 3. It must be admitted that there is some warrant
for this omission of all reference to the subjective side of inference so long as we are dealing with Inductive Logic. The inductive discoverer is of course in a very different position. If he is worthy of the name his mind at every moment will be teeming with notions which he would be as far as any one from calling facts: he is busy making them such to the best of his power. But the logician who follows in his steps, and whose business it is to explain and justify what his leader has discovered, is rather apt to overlook this mental or uncertain stage. What he mostly deals in are the ‘complete inductions’ and ‘well-grounded generalizations’ and so forth, or the exploded errors which contradict them: the prisoners and the corpses respectively, which the real discoverer leaves on the field behind him whilst he presses on to complete his victory. The whole method of science,—expository as contrasted with militant,—is to emphasize the distinction between fact and non-fact, and to treat of little else but these two. In other words a treatise on Inductive Logic can be written without any occasion being found to define what is meant by a notion or concept, or even to employ such terms.
§ 4. And yet, when we come to look more closely, signs may be detected even within the field of Inductive Logic, of an occasional breaking down of the sharp distinction in question; we may meet now and then with entities (to use the widest term attainable) in reference to which it would be hard to say that they are either facts or conceptions. For instance, Inductive Logic has often occasion to make use of Hypotheses: to which of the above two classes are these to be referred? They do not seem in strictness to belong to either; nor are they, as will presently be pointed out, by any means a solitary instance of the kind.
It is true that within the province of Inductive Logic these hypotheses do not give much trouble on this score. However vague may be the form in which they first present themselves to the philosopher's mind, they have not much business to come before us in our capacity