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Untitled Article
His faculty of observation was perfectly obedient to his "will . He could employ it on external or internal objects , excite or suspend it as he pleased . When any purpose was to be answered by observation , not a motion of a straw or a feather escaped his notice ; when his business was to calculate or reason , he became , in a moment , as regardless of all external circumstances as if every sense had at once been annihilated .
The principal object which is to be attained by the exercise of reflection is the deduction of general principles from the facts which observation furnishes ; and in the application of these general principles to the elucidation of new facts , we see the means by which every increase of knowledge affords the power of a further augmentation . It is , therefore , of the utmost importance that these principles should be ascertained to be just and true ; as a defect in them will necessarily vitiate
all our subsequent reasonings . Mathematicians , whose intellects have been confined to one class of subjects , have been known to cast all learning , however various , into the form of theorems , scholiums , and corollaries ; while musicians have been equally expert in arranging the results of reasoning in a scale of harmony . Such inquirers have as little chance of arriving at truth , as a loaded bowl of reaching the mark . The understanding must be rectified before the observations which it takes can be true . As
Dr . Watts says , " Things are to be considered as they are in themselves ; their natures are inflexible , and their natural relations unalterable ; and , therefore , in order to conceive them aright , we must bring our understandings to things , and not pretend to bend and strain things to comport with our fancies and forms . "
Haste in the adoption of general principles is a serious and common error to which we have before adverted . Few persons , perhaps , are as absurd as the traveller in the east who , on entering a new country , and being entertained at an inn where the landlord was intoxicated , and his wife proud of her auburn hair , therefore noted down in his memorandum book , that all
the men of that country were drunken , and all the women red-haired . But we may readily detect errors of the same kind in some department of our reasonings . We are all prone to mistake accessory for necessary circumstances , and to deduce general principles from too limited au experience , and are thus liable to lose all the time and labour employed on the
subsequent reasoning , which is unavoidably defective . All deductions from the false principle that the sun moves round the earth , must be also false ; and those who argue from the assumption ( founded on limited experience ) that there is no such thing as gratitude among the poor , will , it may be hoped , find themselves mistaken .
The same impatience interferes to prevent our discerning in what cases we may expect to arrive at certainty , and where we must be content with a small preponderance of probability . The slightest degree of preponderance is sufficient to afford a basis for belief and for action ; and we should therefore be content with it where certainty cannot be obtained . If we are bent upon establishing on all subjects of inquiry general principles , which are to be as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians , we shall find
ourselves at length encompassed with a host of errors and absurdities , arising from principles which , instead of being founded in truth , are based upon our own ignorance and presumption . It is astonishing how many difficulties melt away under the influence of patient thought . A subject appears at first dark and confused , and formidable objections crowd around it on every side , so that we are tempted to give
Untitled Article
Essays on the Art of Thinking J 53
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1829, page 753, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2578/page/9/
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