subject here and elsewhere, confounds two things which are quite distinct in their nature-the method of invention or discovery, and the exposition or theory of the method, and attributes an efficiency to the latter which in reality belongs only to the former. It is a common fallacy. As Bacon's Novum Organum is conceived to have first taught the art of discovery, so the old Organon of Aristotle is very generally supposed to have first taught men the art of reasoning. But the incontrovertible fact is, that men reasoned just as well before the time of Aristotle as they have done since. What his Organon taught or expounded was not the art but the science of reasoning; that is to say, it investigated what reasoning was, and reduced its formulæ to a system. It no more taught or could teach the art of reasoning than his treatise on the Poetical taught or could teach the art of writing poetry; or than La Place's Mécanique Céleste can be said to teach the art of constructing the heavens.

The system of the heavens, the nature of poetical thought and expression, the laws according to which the mind reasons, are all nearly alike removed from the class of things that can be inculcated by precept. They are subjects for scientific examination, not for being taught as arts. Of the three cases, that of the writing of poetry, as involving the observance of certain forms which are in some degree traditionary or conventional, and admit of being specified and reduced to rules, is the only one in which anything properly called an art is possible. And several Arts of Poetry have been written. But has any man ever been made a poet by studying an Art of Poetry? Has better poetry been written since poetry was made an art than before? The truth is, that all that an art of poetry can teach has nothing more to do with what really constitutes poetry than sweeping in the hearth has with making the fire to burn.

As for the art of reasoning, it is as great an absurdity to talk of such an art as it would be to talk of the art of falling through the air when a man has been thrown out of a window. There is but one way of reasoning. That is to say, a given mind in a given state can reason only in

one way. To take the common example, let a person believe or understand that all men are mortal, and also that John is a man, and he cannot help performing the act of reasoning, which consists in inferring from these two statements, called premisses, the conclusion that John is mortal. No art is required to teach him to do this, as no discipline to which his mind could be subjected could possibly prevent him from doing it. He is without power to do otherwise. And so it is in every other case in which an act of reasoning is performed.

Do all minds, then, reason equally well? In the strict sense of the term reason, they do. Let any two minds equally well apprehend the propositions which form the premisses of a syllogism, and they will infallibly draw from them the same conclusion. The conclusion is, in fact, nothing else than the new form which one of the premisses necessarily assumes as soon as it is viewed along with the other. It assumes this new form to the mind by a law of nature as irresistible as that by which a visible object changes its colour to the eye according to the colour of the light that is made to fall upon it, or of the medium through which it is seen.

Logic does not undertake either to supply the power of comprehending the premisses of a syllogism where it is wanting, or to direct the mind in the selection of the premisses from which it is to draw its conclusions. It does not concern itself at all with the premisses-not even with the question of their truth. All men are immortal; John is a man; therefore John is immortal; that is as correct a syllogism, or as good logic, as the example asserting the opposite, which is commonly given.

Yet in the soundness and judicious selection of the premisses lies all the practical value of any reasoning. The difference in knowledge and capacity between two minds will never be indicated by their disagreeing as to the conclusion to be drawn from the same premisses, when equally well understood by each; but it will be indicated by the one comprehending the premisses more readily or more correctly than the other, or by the one admitting the truth of premisses which the other doubts

or rejects, or, most decisively of all, by the fortunate points of view and courses of inquiry which are adopted by the one and which do not suggest themselves to the other. But of all this logic takes no account.

The utmost that logic can do is to make a single deduction. When the syllogism is completed, its function is performed, its power is gone. In the common

example quoted above, when we have arrived at the conclusion that John is mortal, we cannot by any aid of logic advance another step. Among all its formulæ there is not one that will help us over another inch of ground. If we would carry the speculation further, it must be done by a mental act, which is altogether out of the province of logic, the introduction of a new premiss. It is in the selection of that premiss that the real ability of the reasoner is shown, and that all the value and success of the reasoning consists. As for the conclusions of the successive syllogisms, they are, in moral speculation at least, most commonly not even set down; they are left for the reader to deduce for himself; it is held to be sufficient that he is supplied with the premisses by which they may be suggested, or rather in which they are involved.

But not only is the invention or selection of his premisses, upon which it thus appears that all the success of the reasoner or speculator depends, a thing that is not taught or pretended to be taught by logic; it is manifestly a thing not to be taught at all. It is no more to be taught than the writing of poetry is to be taught. That which alone distinguishes one man from another in ratiocinative speculation, beside what difference there may be between them in their knowledge of the subject, is the difference of the degrees in which they are gifted with quickness, clearness, and comprehensiveness of mental vision-which are qualities as unsusceptible of being communicated by precept as is the quality of being six feet high.

Now what Bacon calls invention or discovery in the arts and sciences is merely a mode of ratiocinative speculation. Such speculation may be carried on by words or

without words-by propositions or by experiments. It is the same mental power working with different instruments, or upon different materials. It is equally in the one case as in the other a power evidently incommunicable by teaching, and which no exposition of its nature or manner of operation can ever convey to him who has it not. It is not of the nature of a spade, or a musquet, or an algebraic formula, or of any thing else which can "be put into men's hands as an organum, or instrument.

Without questioning the truth of the doctrine preached by Bacon, that it is from the observation and examination of things that science must begin, we deny that the promulgation of this truth, however new it might have been as a proposition, was giving men any novum organum, or new instrument of discovery. The practice of the method which he asserts to be the only one by which discoveries can be made, and his assertion, or demonstration if you will, to that effect, have no necessary connexion. Although the assertion had never been made before, the practice may have been going on from the beginning of the world. Indeed, the assertion itself implies the previous existence of the practice, unless it is to be held that no discoveries whatever had been made in the arts and sciences, except perhaps by accident, until Bacon arose.

Exactly the same doctrine that Bacon has laid down for science and philosophy has also been announced, and in our own day generally accepted, as the true faith in poetry. Here too it has been proclaimed that nothing is to be done without the study of the realities of naturethat nature is the supreme rule and standard--that "the art itself is nature.' After some generations in which poets had been more accustomed to look to certain great masters than to this greater mistress, they have been recalled, or rather they have returned, to their true allegiance. For in every such case of the establishment of juster and higher views in any department of intellectual pursuit, the practice precedes the preaching. The better faith always shows itself in production before it takes the form of proposition. It was the poets who

taught the critics here, not the critics who taught the poets. But what critic or theorist ever imagined that, in inculcating what we may call the new doctrine as to this matter, he was putting into the hands of men any thing of the nature of a new organ or instrument? So far from that, the doctrine itself involved the very opposite admission or affirmation. If its account of the nature of poetical production was correct, the practice of the doctrine could be no novelty, whatever the formal statement of it might be; for whatever true poetry had any where been produced was a proof of the practice having been followed. And neither in poetry nor in philosophy could any theory of the method of invention, however correct or complete, communicate any thing of the faculty of invention. It might as reasonably have been expected that the announcement of the true theory of the circulation of the blood would work some great and general improvement in the beating of people's pulses.

Accordingly, in point of fact, the exercise of the inventive faculty, either in poetry or in science, has clearly never been affected by the prevalent state of criticism or the philosophy of method, or by the views in these departments of speculation which may have been entertained by the individual poet or scientific inventor. The poetry that is fullest of invention, fullest of reality and of life, was produced before the birth of criticism; and it never has been pretended that the invention of any of the greatest poets of any age has been quickened or strengthened by the critical theories of their time. Nobody has dreamed of calling Aristotle the Father of Poetry because he wrote a treatise upon the Poetical; although, if no poetry of earlier date had been preserved, this title would doubtless have been claimed for him, and we might possibly have been assured that no poetry would have been produced down to the present hour if that treatise of his had not been written. Such a claim would not have been more preposterous than that which is set up for Bacon as having been the Father of Modern Science. From causes, some of which he has himself explained in this Preface to the Instauratio, the spirit of