§ 3. It is next to be remarked that all generalizations which profess, like the theories of Thales, Democritus, and others of the early Greek speculators, to resolve all things into some one element, or like many modern theories, to resolve phenomena radically different into the same, are necessarily false. By radically different phenomena I mean impressions on our senses which differ in quality, and not merely in degree. On this subject what appeared necessary was said in the chapter on the Limits to the Explanation of Laws of Nature; but as the fallacy is even in our own times a common one, I shall touch on it somewhat further in this place. We have an absolutely dead open-and-shut case on that. Trenton had a gun in his possession. A .32 automatic. Weve traced it from the numbers. It was a gun that was stolen from a house about a year ago in a burglary. I didnt get it and said so. She said: It’s simple. That woman will get her divorce after she’s there six weeks. Forty-two days. I take it that’s what Wendel doesn’t want. He’s not going to pay you after she gets it, is he? I asked my mother if she knew where Annie had been headed for with the twenty-one-year-old Dartmouth senior, and she said Annie had left a number... Rob squeezed the trigger on the automatic, firing twice, blindly. He saw tongues of blue-orange flame spurt from the muzzle of the gun, felt the reassuring jar of the recoil as the mechanism kicked fresh shells into the barrel, and saw that his ruse apparently was effective. As nearly as he could tell in the starlight, the man had ceased to run and had flung himself full length on the deck of the houseboat. In order to throw still further light upon the import of propositions of which the terms are abstract, we will subject one of the examples given above to a minuter analysis. The proposition we shall select is the following:Prudence is a virtue. Let us substitute for the word virtue an equivalent but more definite expression, such as “a mental quality beneficial to society, or “a mental quality pleasing to God, or whatever else we adopt as the definition of virtue. What the proposition asserts is a sequence, accompanied with causation; namely, that benefit to society, or that the approval of God, is consequent on, and caused by, prudence. Here is a sequence; but between what? We understand the consequent of the sequence, but we have yet to analyze the antecedent. Prudence is an attribute; and, in connection with it, two things besides itself are to be considered; prudent persons, who are the subjects of the attribute, and prudential conduct, which may be called the foundation of it. Now is either of these the antecedent? and, first, is it meant, that the approval of God, or benefit to society, is attendant upon all prudent persons? No; except in so far as they are prudent; for prudent persons who are scoundrels can seldom, on the whole, be beneficial to society, nor can they be acceptable to a good being. Is it upon prudential conduct, then, that divine approbation and benefit to mankind are supposed to be invariably consequent? Neither is this the assertion meant, when it is said that prudence is a virtue; except with the same reservation as before, and for the same reason, namely, that prudential conduct, although in so far as it is prudential it is beneficial to society, may yet, by reason of some other of its qualities, be productive of an injury outweighing the benefit, and deserve a displeasure exceeding the approbation which would be due to the prudence. Neither the substance, therefore (viz., the person), nor thephenomenon (the conduct), is an antecedent on which the other term of the sequence is universally consequent. But the proposition, “Prudence is a virtue, is a universal proposition. What is it, then, upon which the proposition affirms the effects in question to be universally consequent? Upon that in the person, and in the conduct, which causes them to be called prudent, and which is equally in them when the action, though prudent, is wicked; namely, a correct foresight of consequences, a just estimation of their importance to the object in view, and repression of any unreflecting impulse at variance with the deliberate purpose. These, which are states of the persons mind, are the real antecedent in the sequence, the real cause in the causation, asserted by the proposition. But these are also the real ground, or foundation, of the attribute Prudence; since wherever these states of mind exist we may predicate prudence, even before we know whether any conduct has followed. And in this manner every assertion respecting an attribute, may be transformed into an assertion exactly equivalent respecting the fact or phenomenon which is the ground of the attribute. And no case canbe assigned, where that which is predicated of the fact or phenomenon, does not belong to one or other of the five species formerly enumerated: it is either simple Existence, or it is some Sequence, Co-existence, Causation, or Resemblance. Chapter XIII. He tried to make this grown-up and all it did was sound silly. I laughed. He got red in the face and said:Whats funny about that? I’ve always thought a man who didn’t marry was losing a beautiful experience. Yes, I think now. It was nice, Maggie. Sometimes it was nice. Ive always been interested in it. Of the science, therefore, which expounds the operations of the human understanding in the pursuit of truth, one essential part is the inquiry: What are the facts which are the objects of intuition or consciousness, and what are those which we merely infer? But this inquiry has never been considered a portion of logic. Its place is in another and a perfectly distinct department of science, to which the name metaphysics more particularly belongs: that portion of mental philosophy which attempts to determine what part of the furniture of the mind belongs to it originally, andwhat part is constructed out of materials furnished to it from without. To this science appertain the great and much debated questions of the existence of matter; the existence of spirit, and of a distinction between it and matter; the reality of time and space, as things without the mind, and distinguishable from the objects which are said to exist in them. For in the present state of the discussion on these topics, it is almost universally allowed that the existence of matter or of spirit, of space or of time, is in its nature unsusceptible of being proved; and that if any thing is known of them, it must be by immediate intuition. To the same science belong the inquiries into the nature of Conception, Perception, Memory, and Belief; all of which are operations of the understanding in the pursuit of truth; but with which, as phenomena of the mind, or with the possibility which may ormay not exist of analyzing any of them into simpler phenomena, the logician as such has no concern. To this science must also be referred the following, and all analogous questions: To what extent our intellectual faculties and our emotions are innate—to what extent the result of association: Whether God and duty are realities, the existence of which is manifest to us a priori by the constitution of our rational faculty; or whether our ideas of them are acquired notions, the origin of which we are able to trace and explain; and the reality of the objects themselves a question not of consciousness or intuition, but of evidence and reasoning. The man jerked a gun out of his hip pocket. His lips tightened. His foot slammed down on the brake pedal. The car screamed to a sliding stop. The problem of the Deductive Method is, to find the law of an effect, from the laws of the different tendencies of which it is the joint result. The first requisite, therefore, is to know the laws of those tendencies; the law of each of the concurrent causes: and this supposes a previous process of observation or experiment upon each cause separately; or else a previous deduction, which also must depend for its ultimate premises on observation or experiment. Thus, if the subject be social or historical phenomena, the premises of the Deductive Method must be the laws of the causes which determine that class of phenomena; and those causes are human actions, together with the general outward circumstances under theinfluence of which mankind are placed, and which constitute mans position on the earth. The Deductive Method, applied to social phenomena, must begin, therefore, by investigating, or must suppose to have been already investigated, the laws of human action, and those properties of outward things by which the actions of human beings in society are determined. Some of these general truths will naturally be obtained by observation and experiment, others by deduction: the more complex laws of human action, for example, may be deduced from the simpler ones; but the simple or elementary laws will always, and necessarily, have been obtained by a directly inductive process. Chap. xi. Until a short while ago, when he had heard voices. Familiar voices. Roy Grace. Cleo and— he was sure — Kaitlynn. Up until then the only sounds had been the occasional pained bark of a dog. The two men were silent for a moment. We went down the line at the right, with the gals leaning out the windows and talking to us. They were very frank about what they were talking about; too frank for Lester. He was red in the face and so embarrassed he could hardly keep up with us. Half way down the line the cop jerked his thumb at a tall blonde leaning out of her crib and said: The big metal fire door to the roof is closed, but not locked. I twist the knob, and shove the door open, and come out onto a tarred roof that is blisteringly hot in the noonday sun. I turn automatically and at once toward the pigeon coops on the right. The birds huddle on their perches, cooing softly, gently rustling their wings..