Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/175

SOME PROBLEMS OF CONCEPTION. 159 suppose that in an early stage of zoology the conception of an animal is grasped abstractly, i.e., by certain specifiable characteristics in Aristotle's system, for instance, the pos- session of sensation. Then animals are either vertebrate or invertebrate, and vertebrates are either Mammals, Birds, Fish, Reptiles, or Amphibia. And the characteristic of possessing mammae is just as ' external ' to the vertebrate as the grass which it eats is external to the herbivorous mammal. The progress of Natural Classification consists in a gradual transformation of these external differences into alternative modifications of more primitive forms. Somje quadrupeds have claws and some have hoofs ; some hoofs are cloven and some uncloven. All this looks like the merest accident, until the genealogy of the Horse shows how the different results are progressive modifications of a single form. Differences then which are at first mere differences become as we go on connected differences, and the organic classification supersedes the disjunctive by ab- sorption. How far this process can go, whether in the ideal of knowledge it would extend to all differences and embrace the whole system of things, is a question which would take us far beyond the limits of this paper. In regard to inference, the abstract universal (as we may now more correctly call it) is of course the basis of Syllogistic Deduction, or, as Mill very appropriately called it, " the Geometrical Method ". No one, as Bacon admitted, can doubt the validity of Syllogism provided that the universals which it uses are adequately founded and properly defined. The real fallacy of Syllogism is to take it from the region of the abstract and apply it to the organic universal. In so far as the middle term is qualitatively unchanged in the two premisses the conclusion holds. But the organic universal is modified in every fresh species and if we take it ab- stractly for purposes of deduction we shall go wrong. It sounds plausible to argue that the Economic Man is no more and no less an abstraction than Energy or Inertia. But the precise difference is that the effects of Inertia are, so far as they go, identical in all cases and we know exactly how much to allow for them in whatever combination they appear. But man as an economic agent differs according to all gradations of his character and intelligence. Even his selfishness if we single out that characteristic is one thing if it is stupid selfishness, and quite another if it is far-seeing. The difference of the two in their effects on the rate of wages or the fate of a Trade Union would be immense. The argument from what man does must yield here to the argu-