Methods of Reasoning.

Reader, you are perhaps better acquainted with the methods of reasoning followed as a fashion by the different schools of wranglers than I am, let us however refer to them.

That known as Aristotle's mode, the syllogistic, was long adhered to; it obtained particular favour among dogmatists, but its days are on the wane, it is uncertain and oft leads to error. We cannot be sure that the major term is always correct, it has first to be proven. The minor term may or may not correspond with it, so in every case the conclusion is extremely liable to be vitiated. Reasoning from hypotheses is like building castles in the air, it takes the foundation for granted which may be no foundation at all, and the first fresh breeze of true discovery lays our superstructure prostrate in the dust.

Reasoning from Analogy, of which Butler has given us the best example in our language, is now so generally considered unreliable that it has almost ceased to be a process of reasoning, and is now simply used by sensible writers for purposes of rhetoric or embellishment; there are however a few who still adhere to what they chose to term—strict Analogy, but their number is lessening every day. In my view Analogy seems rather to be a process through which the mind passes the subject before it proceeds to investigate it, than a mode of proof page 5 Bacon's method of induction, or synthetical reasoning, is now admitted by all learned and intelligent minds to be a correct method. By the Positivists, or Aguste Comto's disciples, it is thought to be the only correct and true method. The Harmonialist admits its correctness, so far as it goes, but looks upon it as only half satisfying to man's whole nature, and says demonstration, by tangible realities presented to the senses, may be all the proof a certain class of minds require, but this reasoning from facts in a retrograde manner, if solely followed, leads men to the belief that nothing exists beyond what the senses can recognise. Nevertheless this is indisputably a true method of reasoning. Every thing which the senses recognise when in a normal condition demonstrates its own existence, but there are Minds, lives, Principles, Natures, Qualities, Affinities, and Essences, in existence, which we cannot submit to mathematical rule; too subtile are they to be operated upon by our gross synthetical instrumentality. The Baconian m ode of reasoning ought to be kept in its proper sphere as applicable to the Physical Sciences. Locke misapplied it to meta-physics. Carry out his mode, and the ideas of Infinity and Eternity pass from the vocabulary of man. When he said that nothing was in the understanding which had not arrived there through the senses, the reply of Leibnitz—"Yes there is the understanding itself"—vas a full and sufficient answer.

David Hume and Dr. Paley misapplied the method, and drew opposite conclusions. When two such minds as these follow the same method and arrive at opposite results, the fault is more likely tobe in the method than in the men.

But the most amusing result of all is to see the Length to which Aguste Comte has been driven. He has got as far as "Materialism in Physcology, Selfishness in Ethics, and Atheim in Theology," and he could not help himself. The system ho lays down for himself drives him to that pitiful end, and whoever accepts his method cannot escape his conclusions.

But the Harmonialist refers to the other end of the same chin of reasoning; a very old method "more ancient than the divine plato, its august diciple," probably the oldest of all, as the mind invaiably adopts it before it seeks to prove by induction. This mode commences a priori from what appears self-evident to the mind, descends, [unclear: meets], page 6 and overlaps with perfect harmony, the sensuous proofs of Induction. "He therefore only is true to his whole nature who, renouncing all senseless hypotheses; reasons synthetically from effect to cause, and analytically from cause to effect." Nor is the one method of any rea, use in arriving at ultimate conclusions in the investigation of mind without the other.

We have already noticed the absurd conclusions to which M. Comte has been driven by carrying the sensuous method beyond its proper domain, and such has also been the result of the Cartesian method, from its one-sided spiritual view, that its disciples have truly earned for themselves the titles of Mystics, Dreamers, and Visionaries, landing ingloriously through their unbalanced enthusiasm in the mire of absurdity.

No wonder Descartes is now at a discount; he will never be properly appreciated until his book of Method and Principles takes its place by the side of Bacon's Novum Organon, and the Physical and Spiritual unite as a harmonious whole, forming a full and complete mode of reasoning.