Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.
An Inductive Reasoner
An Inductive Reasoner.
In boyhood, and again in youth, when he was an ensign in a regiment stationed at Dublin, he came under the influence of a man who influenced many men, including some New Zealand colonists—the remarkable and eccentric Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, and he claimed that the growth of his mind had been affected by that teacher of teachers. Whatever he may have learnt from him, he never learnt the art of reasoning, at least in syllogistic form. For this, at all times, he evinced a notorious incapacity, and often the ratiocination of his Parliamentary speeches in later years evoked the emphatic contempt of his fellow-legislators. But, if his faculty of deductive reasoning was in defect, a far higher power—the commanding faculty of inductive reasoning —was of lordly proportions. It was first shown in his despatches from New Zealand, and next in those from South Africa. Through the long and very interesting succession of these you always perceive, under whatever obscurations of masked passion or undisguised perversity, the inductive reasoner who is travelling slowly to his end along a devious route with many a winding and turning, and with not a little bowing and scraping and all manner of deprecatory formulas; when at last he arrives, you perceive that he has gained his destination by the path the easiest for him to follow and the best to convince his reader (the powerful Secretary for the Colonies or his still more potent Under-Secretary) that the end was one to be supremely desired or else most anxiously shunned. Such despatches exhibit, as many of his speeches exhibited, a higher species of logic than the scholastic. It would be easy to convert any of the more elaborate into a sorites—a chain of syllogisms.