A Logic of Facts; Or, Every-day Reasoning

by George Jacob Holyoake

The great treasure-house of nature is open to all, and the
only fee demanded for inspection is attention.—Detrosibr.

Observation** of nature is the only source of truth. Discursive observation is the art of noticing circumstances evident to the senses. Men who do this intentionally and carefully, with a view of acquiring a knowledge of phenomena and their causes, are distinguished for their varied knowledge and often for their great discoveries. Shakspere must have owed the varied facts interwoven into his delineations of human character to this source. The clever personations of Garrick were suggested by his curious observations of men and manners. Sir Walter Scott is known to have been a careful observer. It is said, 'no expression escaped him if it bore on the illustration of character.'

** The term observation is used here in the sense in which
it is commonly understood, signifying cognisance in general.
It includes whatever information we acquire by the meant of
consciousness, or experience, or through the agency of the
senses.

Claude Lorraine, with a passionate sympathy for the beautiful, sate in the fields from sun-rise to dewy eve, watching, catching, and saturating his very soul, as it were, with all the evanescent beauties of a summer's day, as they chased each other over the face of the fair scene; fixing on canvass, taking captive and imprisoning in our cabinets, the wanton daughters of nature, that before his time never were caught, but flitted before the fascinated eye only long enough to make the heart afterwards feel more achingly the void of their vanishing. And the artist who has done all this, do we not justly call him an imaginative painter, to distinguish him from those meaner geniuses who were, in painting, very like Crabbe in poetry, merely faithful delineators of the vulgarer objects of social life, bunches of carrots, drunken boors, chamber maids and chimney corners.

'Has the reader ever seen Mr. Macready in the character of Macbeth? If he have, he can never forget the stupefied murderer withdrawing from the chamber in which he has just done the dread act, with fascinated gaze retreatingly regarding his royal victim, and awaking with a guilty start as he runs unconsciously against his hard-souled partner in guilt, who in vain tries to infuse into the weaker spirit of her paralysed husband her own metaphysical superiority. In this scene we know that Mr. Macready's acting was perfect, for the pressure at our heart, the suspension of our breathing, and the creeping of our hair, made us feel that it was so. We see him now, as stealthily he places his foot over the threshold of the chamber of death to re-appear on the stage; the intensely staring eye, that cannot remove from what 'tis horror to look upon; the awfully natural absorption of his soul by that "sorry sight," which one little minute has brought about; his starting and awaking from his entranced state, as he runs against his wife in his retreat, and his full passionate burst of blended remorse, terror, and superstition, as refusing counsel, regardless of remonstrance, heedless of probable detection, he pours forth his "brain-sickly" convictions, of having in one little moment cut the cable that had held him to the rest of the great human family. All this we can see in our mind's eye, for the actor gave us a picture of passion that time can never obliterate. But how would it have been with a cloddish unimaginative fellow, whom nature never intended should understand Shakspere? Would he not, conscious that he was among shoals and quicksands of feelings, too nice for his appreciation, seek to tear over all by a tempest of rant, which would be a more ruthless murder on Shakspere than Macbeth's on the king? And why should we be delighted with Mr. Macready's delineation, and disgusted with the ranter? Simply because the former has observed, treasured up, and felt every genuine exhibition of human feeling that came in his way, and applied it appropriately to all the situations to which it was related in nature. A single instance will make this clear. Mr. Kean one night, in the concluding part of the combat scene of Richard III., when supposed to be wounded to the death, before falling, steadily regarded his foe, and painfully raising his right arm in act to strike, the relaxed and dying limb, unable to second the spirit, fell heavily and harmlessly to his side, indicating merely the fierce bravery of the usurper living in all its strength, when the body which it would move, was all but a senseless clod. Pit, gallery, and boxes arose with an enthusiasm beyond description, and by their repeated plaudits bore testimony the intense naturalness of the struggle. The actor being afterwards complimented upon the hit, said, that he had taken the action from Jack Painter, the prize-fighter, when the latter was beaten in some one of his contests, and it immediately struck the tragedian that the very same thing would come in beautifully in the dying scene of Richard III. What was this, if not imagination? Kean saw Painter's action to be the natural effects of undying valour in vain endeavouring to contend against overwhelming power. Remembering and associating it with his previous conception of the character of Richard III., the actor saw it could be most strikingly incorporated with that picture of passion the usurper's death should present to our view. Seeing this, he combined it with his previous delineation, and thereby did precisely the same thing as the poet in using a fine simile, or the painter in introducing sun-light over a part of his picture. It was a portion of nature carried away by the actor to be reproduced on a future and fitting occasion.'*

The beginning of all knowledge is observation. It has been shown by Mr. Mill that 'axioms,' which lie at the foundation of all reasoning and all science, 'are experimental truths—generalisations from observation. The proposition that Two straight lines cannot inclose a space—or, in other words, Two straight lines which have once met do not meet again, but continue to diverge—is an induction from the evidence of our senses.'** 'Axioms are but a class of inductions from experience: the simplest and easiest cases of generalisation,' from the facts furnished to, us by our senses or by our internal consciousness.'***

Autobiography, or the metaphysical revelation of a man to himself, is a source of valuable psychological and moral truths. From this centre frequently radiate new lights upon human nature. But this is resolvable into a species of mental observation. It is self-inspection.

We have lately been told that 'Poetry is called upon to work in the discovery of truth. The imagination has always been the great discovering power. Discoveries are the poetry of science. The case is rare indeed in which, by merely advancing step by step in the exercise of the logical faculty, any new truth has been arrived at. Logic comes afterwards, to verify that which imagination sees with its far-darting glance.'****

* Phrenology Tested, by A. M., of the Middle Temple, pp.
143-5.
** Logic, vol 1, p. 305.
*** Idem, pp. 328-9.
**** W. J. Fox's Lectures to the Working Classes: Genius and
Poetry of Campbell, p.;5.

This seems to call upon us to recognise the imagination as fresh source of truth. But the definition of imagination, as given by Emerson, reveals to us its origin in observation;—'The imagination may be defined to be the use which reason makes of the material world. Shakspere's imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, to embody any capricious shade of thought that is uppermost in his mind.' Hence, though we agree with Gilfillan that imagination is thought on fire, we must confess that the ignition is material.