Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/408

COMPARISON IN PSYCHOLOGY AND IN LOGIC. 407 comparison, which is in fact simply inductive analysis. Here the suggestion of Identity and Diversity operates, but favourable con- ditions enable it to be transmuted almost at once into the suggestion of a pervading principle ; and the subsumption be- comes subsumption under a property or principle, rather than under an unanalysed content. This is because the emphasis and repetition of certain attributes break through the shell of the particular examples at once and without effort : comparison in the psychological sense becomes a vanishing moment, and the pervading identity in all the data forces itself on our consciousness; i.e., all the data are subsumed under one identity. There is a cage in the Zoological Gardens containing several kinds (six, I think) of hawk or falcon. I happened to see them fed, and was struck by the attitude which each of the six birds assumed, not attempting to begin its food at once, but putting one foot on it and looking round as if suspicious of an attack. So far as a first rough identification goes, the single judgment of perception not only started the comparison but completed it. But of course such an identification is a mere suggestion compared with real inductive analysis. For, to such analysis, it would not matter about the attitude being the same in the birds which I happened to observe the data of my comparison in the psychological sense but only what the attitude was, what it meant, and of what birds it was really characteristic. As regards the process of the comparison itself comparison in the psychological sense the account of it as alternate subsumption, or, as I have preferred to say, successive subsumption, is not excluded by the mere singleness of the perceptive judgment. We must admit that a judgment may be single, and yet contain parts which are also judgments. I make no doubt that within the continuous whole of the comprehensive perception, "all these birds, &c.," there was a series of perceptive judgments in which the attitude of each bird was subsumed under that of some other, the latter being itself qualified and reinforced by reproduction of the attitude of those previously noticed. Only, in an example where the com- mon attribute is so directly perceptible as it is in this, we find the logical content of identical perception dwarfing the particular in- stances and emerging as a characteristic or attribute within which the several instances find their distinct places. Another case which I remember distinctly was the occasion of my first realising the typical appearance of implements of the stone age. I had previously seen only isolated and inferior specimens, and had felt perhaps a little sceptical as to their being the work of man's hands at all. But happening to enter the Blackmore Museum at Salisbury, where there were hundreds of excellent specimens arranged in gradation according to the fineness of their workmanship, I was of course at once enabled to recognise the identity of type pervading them. And I have no doubt that in such a graduated arrangement the appearance of the finer products of more marked shape and adaptation to their