Having secured these thoughts
from being lost, I pushed on into the other parts of the subject, to try
whether I could do anything further towards clearing up the theory of
logic generally. I grappled at once with the problem of Induction,
postponing that of Reasoning, on the ground that it is necessary to
obtain premises before we can reason from them. Now, Induction is mainly
a process for finding the causes of effects: and in attempting to fathom
the mode of tracing causes and effects in physical science, I soon saw
that in the more perfect of the sciences, we ascend, by generalization
from particulars, to the tendencies of causes considered singly, and
then reason downward from those separate tendencies, to the effect of
the same causes when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate
analysis of this deductive process; the common theory of the syllogism
evidently throwing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from Hobbes and
my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best
concrete instances I could find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics,
occurred to me as the most complete example of the logical process I was
investigating. On examining, accordingly, what the mind does when it
applies the principle of the Composition of Forces, I found that it
performs a simple act of addition.
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