164

O.54

If all the arguments that proceed upon any one given principle depend upon the truth of any one proposition, it will suffice if that be in the reasoner's mind, as an active habit, as it certainly must be [be]fore he can veraciously judge it to be true. It therefore belongs to the propulsive leg of the argumentative step and not to that leg which people unwisely call their "best face," because forsooth they put it forward. Such for example is the fact that every reasoner possesses a fund of accumulated experience of objects, of events, and of tendencies. Consequently when I reason, "In all my experience of objects there is not one that is at once S and P," and therefore presumably there never will be such a one, the deference to that great multitude of experience of objects is not logically a