[40] Principles of Psychology, I, p. 241, note.
[41] Ibid., p. 258.
[42] Psychology. Briefer Course. P. 468.
[43] Angell, Psychology, p. 65.
[44] Psychology, Vol. I, p. 251.
[45] Thorstein Veblen: The Instinct of Workmanship, p. 316.
[46] It may still be argued that we must depend upon analogy in our acceptance or rejection of a new commodity. For any element of novelty must surely suggest something to us, must mean something to us, if it is to attract or repel. Thus, the motor-car will whirl us rapidly over the country, the motor-boat will dart over the water without effort on our part. And in such measure as we have had them hitherto, we have always enjoyed experiences of rapid motion. These new instruments simply promise a perfectly well-known sort of experience in fuller measure. So the argument may run. And our mental process in such a case may accordingly be held to be nothing more mysterious than a passing by analogy from the old ways in which we got rapid motion in the past to the new way which now promises more of the same. And more of the same is what we want.
"More of the same" means here intensive magnitude and in this connection at all events it begs the question. Bergson's polemic seems perfectly valid against such a use of the notion. But kept in logical terms the case seems clearer. It is said that we reason in such a case by "analogy." We do, indeed; but what is analogy? The term explains nothing until the real process behind the term is clearly and realistically conceived. What I shall here suggest holds true, I think, as an account of analogical inference generally and not simply for the economic type of case we have here to do with. Reasoning is too often thought of as proceeding from given independent premises—as here (1) the fact that hitherto the driving we have most enjoyed and the sailing we have most enjoyed have been fast and (2) the fact that the motor-car is fast. But do we accept the conclusion because the premises suggest it in a way we cannot resist? On the contrary, stated thus, the premises clearly do not warrant the conclusion that the motor-car will be enjoyable. Such a statement of the premises is wholly formal and ex post facto. What, then, is our actual mental process in the case? The truth is, I think, that we simply—yes, "psychologically"—wish to try that promised unheard-of rate of speed! That comes first and foremost. But we mean to be reasonably prudent on the whole, although we are avowedly adventurous just now in this particular direction! We, therefore, ransack our memory for other fast things we have known, to see whether they have encouragement to give us. We try to supply ourselves with a major premise because the new proposal in its own right interests us—instead of having the major premise already there to coerce us by a purely "logical" compulsion as soon as we invade its sphere of influence. And confessedly, in point of "logic," there is no such compulsion in the second figure: there is only a timid and vexatious neutrality, a mere "not proven."
Why, then, do we in fact take the much admired "inductive leap," in seeming defiance of strict logic? Why do we close our eyes to logic, turn our back upon logic, behave as if logic were not and had never been? In point of fact, we do nothing of the sort. The "inductive leap" is no leap away from logic, but the impulsion of logic's mainspring seen only in its legitimate event. Because we have not taken care to see the impulse coming, it surprises us and we are frightened. And we look about for an illusive assurance in some "law of thought," or some question-begging "universal premise" of Nature's "uniformity." We do not see that we were already conditionally committed to the "leap" by our initial interest. Getting our premises together is no hurried forging of a chain to save us from our own madness in the nick of time. We are only hoping to rid ourselves of an excess of conservative ballast. To reason by analogy is not to repress or to dispense with the interest in the radically novel, but to give methodical and intelligent expression to that interest.
[47] Aristotle's Nicomachaean Ethics (Welldon's transl.), Book VIII.