TWO:However, as we have seen, he is not above turning it against Mill. The drift of his own illustration is not very clear, but we suppose it implies that the matron unconsciously frames the general proposition: My remedy is good for all children suffering from the same disease as Lucy; and with equal unconsciousness reasons down from this to the case of her neighbours child. Now, it is quite unjustifiable to call Mills analysis superficial because it leaves out of account a hypothesis incompatible with the nominalism which Mill professed. It is still more unjustifiable to quote against it390 the authority of a philosopher who perfectly agreed with those who disbelieve in the possibility of unconscious knowledge,286 and contemptuously rejected Platos opinion to the contrary. Nor is this all. The doctrine that reasoning is from particulars to particulars, even when it passes through general propositions, may be rigorously deduced from Aristotles own admissions. If nothing exists but particulars, and if knowledge is of what exists, then all knowledge is of particulars. Therefore, if the propositions entering into a chain of reasoning are knowledge, they must deal with particulars exclusively. And, quite apart from the later developments of Aristotles philosophy, we have his express assertion, that all generals are derived from particulars, which is absolutely incompatible with the alleged fact, that all knowledge, all thought, rests on universal truths, on general propositions; that all knowledge, whether deductive or inductive, is arrived at by the aid, the indispensable aid, of general propositions. To Aristotle the basis of knowledge was not truths of any kind, but concepts; and in the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics he has explained how these concepts are derived from sense-perceptions without the aid of any propositions whatever.CHAPTER XII. BELTS FOR TRANSMITTING POWER.
