Elements of the philosophy of the human mind / by Dugald Stewart.

  • Dugald Stewart
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elements of the philosophy of the human mind / by Dugald Stewart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    municatc their knowledge to others, who are ahle to exhibit, in their natural order, the different steps of any investigation by which they have been led to form a particular conclusion. The common observation, therefore, that an obscure elocution always indicates an imperfect knowledge of the subject; although it may perhaps be true with respect to men avIio have cultivated the art of speaking, is by no means to be relied on as a general rule, in judging of the talents of those whose speculations have been carried on with a view merely to their own private satis- faction. In the course of my own experience, I have heard of more than one instance, of men who, without any mathematical edu- cation, were able, on a little reflection, to give a solution of any simple algebraical problem; and who, at the same time, were perfectly incapable of explaining by what steps they obtained the result * In these cases, we have a direct proof of the pos- sibility of investigating even truths which are pretty remote, by an intellectual process which, as soon as it is finished, vanished almost entirely from the memory. It is probable, that some- thing of the same kind takes place much more frequently in the other branches of knowledge, in which our reasonings consist commonly but of a few steps. Indeed, I am inclined to think, that it is in this way that by far the greater part of our specula- tive conclusions are formed. There is no talent, I apprehend, so essential to a public speaker, as to be able to state clearly every different step of those trains of thought by which he himself was led to the con- clusions he wishes to establish. Much may be here done by study and experience. Even in those cases in which the truth of a proposition seems to strike us instantaneously, although we may not be able, at first, to discover the media of proof, we sel- dom fail in the discovery by perseverance. Nothing contributes so much to form this talent as the study of metaphysics; not * [Prodigies of arithmetical ability, like Buxton and Zerah Colburn, have usually been found incapable of explaining the processes by which they performed their computations with such marvellous quickness.]
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