Generalization

“ True generalization seems to consist, more than anything else, in the reduction of facts to law; that is to say, in a conscious abstraction of differences, in a conscious recognition of the fundamental determinism which binds things up together and which precisely eludes both savages and animals. ”

“ One of the distinctive characteristics of our mind is its power of generalization, of perceiving the common in the various, of reducing the multiplex to unity; and this power is proportional to its degree of intelligence. ”

“ First, that character ought to be measured by carefully recorded acts, representative of the usual conduct. An ordinary generalization is nothing more than a muddle of vague memories of inexact observations. It is an easy vice to generalize. ”

“ Generalization, on the other hand, consists in an ideal compounding of abstractions, “when, comparing a number of objects, we seize on their resemblances; when we concentrate our attention on these points of similarity.... ”

“ You ought to gain in power to analyze and compare, so that all the fallacies which consist in presenting things as like, which are not like, should not be able to befog your reason. You ought to become able to recognize and test a generalization, and to distinguish between true generalizations and dogmas on the one hand, or commonplaces on another, or whimsical speculations on another. ”

“ It is, however, of immediate importance to the point in discussion, that the reader should be made to see how altogether incompatible the principle of judging by General Consequences is with the Idea of an Eternal, Omnipresent, and Omniscient Being;—that he should be made aware of the absurdity of attributing any form of Generalization to the All-perfect Mind. To generalize is a faculty and function of the human understanding, and from the imperfection and limitation of the understanding are the use and the necessity of generalizing derived. ”

“ LEARN TO GENERALIZE.—Draw the most general conclusion possible from the premises. Try to see if a general principle can be laid down. This is a most important faculty to acquire. At the same time, avoid the prevalent fault of hasty generalization, based on insufficient data. ”

“ Generalization.—The great changes which thus take place in the history of science, the revolutions of the intellectual world, have, as a usual and leading character, this, that they are steps of generalization ”

“ We hear very frequent mention of ascending from particular to general propositions, and from these to propositions still more general;—of 99 truths included in other truths of a higher degree of generality;—of different stages of generalization;—and of the highest step of the process of discovery, to which all others are subordinate and preparatory. ”

“ Given the very young child struggling to evolve its working rule out of nebulæ, how do its elders aid it? The isolated fact without background or connection, the generalization with no regard to its particular application, the specific rule that will not fit the general case—these too often are its portion, resulting in lack of perspective, no sense of proportion, and no grasp of values. ”

“ What we have said of empirical generalizations from times past to times still to come, holds equally true of similar generalizations from present times to times past; when persons whose acquaintance with moral and social facts is confined to their own age, take the men and the things of that age for the type of men and things in general, and apply without scruple to the interpretation of the events of history, the empirical laws which represent sufficiently for daily guidance the common phenomena of human nature at that time and in that particular state of society. ”

“ There is first the generalization—very frequently the shape an expert’s opinion takes. If he says that timber tracts are worth so many dollars an acre as timber and so many dollars an acre as farms, his opinion is valuable or not depending upon what the basis of his judgment is. If it develops that he has observed many hundreds of such tracts of land, and that these different tracts lay in many different places, you safely conclude that his testimony, although a [52] generalization, is sound because it is based upon wide observation. ”

“ And whenever it is sufficient to know how the great majority of the human race, or of some nation or class of persons, will think, feel, and act, these propositions are equivalent to universal ones. For the purposes of political and social science this is sufficient. As we formerly remarked,269 an approximate generalization is, in social inquiries, for most practical purposes equivalent to an exact one; that which is only probable when asserted of individual human beings indiscriminately selected, being certain when affirmed of the character and collective conduct of masses. ”

“ They should be shown, wherever possible, how the conclusions of men on some of the most important problems that have been studied have changed from time to time. They can at times be made to realize the folly of overhasty generalization. ”

“ The distinctions go deeper as we ascend the scale, and there are no two beings alike in their powers of abstract thinking, the nature of their intellectual, emotional and moral qualities, and the groupings of these qualities—in a word, their individualities. Now one thing demanded by the developed intellects of this age is a generalization that will cover and explain these perplexing differences. ”

“ Not only there are such generalizations, but it will presently be shown that the general science of society, which inquires into the laws of succession and co-existence of the great facts constituting the state of society and civilization at any time, can proceed in no other manner than by making such generalizations--afterward to be confirmed by connecting them with the psychological and ethological laws on which they must really depend. ”

“ He possessed great power of generalization and could readily reduce complicated and voluminous facts to their proper classes, and thus completely master them. Few men in American history have possessed this ability in a pre-eminent degree. ”

“ Remote as they seem from practical application, the highest generalizations are not unfrequently the most potent in their effects, in virtue of their influence on all those subordinate generalizations which regulate practice. ”

“ Yet we hold that whatever the mind cognizes at all, it cognizes in the concrete, as an individual object. And therefore we deny that the ideas of the necessary, the universal, of necessary cause, and the like, which the author calls intuitions, and treats as first principles, necessary assumptions, abstract ideas, etc., are abstractions, mental conceptions, or generalizations ”

“ Accordingly, while almost all generalizations relating to Man and Society, antecedent to the last fifty or sixty years, have erred in the gross way which we have attempted to characterize, namely, by implicitly assuming that nature and society will forever revolve in the same orbit, and exhibit essentially the same phenomena ”

“ To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization. ”

“ When, however, we find it possible to connect many of these detached generalizations together, by discovering the more general laws of which they are cases, and to the operation of which in some particular sets of viii circumstances they are due, we gain not only a scientific, but a practical advantage ”

“ But in negation there are no gradations, and no series; the generalizations, therefore, which deny the possibility of any given condition of man and society merely because it has never yet been witnessed, can not possess this higher degree of validity even as empirical laws. ”

“ With respect to general propositions of this class, that is, which affirm the bare fact of existence, they have a peculiarity which renders the logical treatment of them a very easy matter; they are generalizations which are sufficiently proved by a single instance. ”

“ From the very councils of absolute idealism there has issued a distinction which is fast becoming current, between the World of Appreciation, or the realm of moral and logical principles, and the World of Description, or the realm of empirical generalizations and mechanical causes. ”

“ Let us suppose that the generalisation to be justified is one which asserts that the existence of a kind of object, which we will call A, is generally preceded, accompanied, or followed by the existence of a kind of object, which we call B. A, for instance, might be the hearing of a certain word by one person, and B the thought of that which we call the meaning of the word, in another person; and the generalisation to be justified might be that when one person hears a word, not spoken by himself, someone else has generally thought of the meaning of that word. ”

“ That this is the sense and arguing of the author will further appear by his answering the question he in another place puts: 'Since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general terms?' His answer is: 'Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas.' ("Essay on Human Understanding," Bk. III, chap. III, paragraph 6.) But it seems that a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. ”

“ In all our knowledge of general principles, what actually happens is that first of all we realise some particular application of the principle, and then we realise that the particularity is irrelevant, and that there is a generality which may equally truly be affirmed. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the reader comes to the conclusion that a particular generalisation is out of conformity with his experience, that generalisation will go forward shorn of some, or perchance all, its authority. ”

“ That is to say, unless we have reason to assert a generalisation—the generalisation that objects of a certain kind are generally made by men, we have no reason to suppose that these particular objects, which are of the kind in question, were made by men. ”

“ Every word is a generalisation, and contains in itself a general idea, the so-called root. These first generalisations are, no doubt, at first the work of mother-wit and untaught intelligence only, and hence the necessity of constantly correcting them, whether by experience or by philosophy. ”

“ One is a statement about phenomena, about the objects which are actually in my possession; the other is a statement about my feelings, about my wants and desires. There are facts, to be got at by common sense, about the kind of thing that a man of a certain character and occupation will like to have in his house, and these facts may be organized into general statements on the assumption of uniformity in nature. Now the organized results of common sense dealing with facts are just science and nothing else. ”

“ Let us see how, in these special classes of cases, we shall succeed in verifying the natural presupposition of common sense, which regards error as possible only when our object is not wholly present to mind, and which assumes that a judgment can have an object that is yet only partially present to mind. In choosing the classes of cases, we shall first follow common sense as to their definition. We shall take just the assumptions of daily life, and shall show that they lead us into difficulty. We are not for the first bound to explain why these assumptions are made. ”

“ On the other hand, there are those who assert that nature has general and fixed characteristics; in discovering them, we penetrate into the essence of things. Events and individuals have but a borrowed existence; under their fleeting appearances, we must seek the enduring; and thus, the greater the generalisation, the higher we rise in reality and in dignity. ”

“ And when the generalisation is put to a test, by applying it to hundreds of separate facts which seemed to be hopelessly contradictory the moment before, each of them assumes its due position, increasing the impressiveness of the picture, accentuating some characteristic outline, or adding an unsuspected detail full of meaning. The generalisation gains in strength and extent ”

“ Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort. ”

“ All thought begins with conceptions to a certain extent generalised, and thence is developed in two directions. On the one hand, generalisations become wider and wider, binding together by common properties a larger and larger number of phenomena, and so embracing a wider field of the world of facts. ”

“ No one stably or sincerely uses the more critical notion, of a group of sense- qualities united by a law. With these categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together, and connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural mother-tongue of thought.
Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think. ”

“ Abstract terms result from the analysis of concrete things into their qualities; and conversely a concrete term may be viewed as denoting the synthesis of qualities into an individual thing. When several things agree in more than one quality, there may be an abstract term denoting the union of qualities in which they agree, and omitting their peculiarities; as 'human nature' denotes the common qualities of men, 'civilisation' the common conditions of civilised peoples. ”

“ To understand, we have analyzed the intellectual world into two classes, good and evil; and to discover the members of each class, we fix their qualities, not by the hypothetick, but the practical mode of reasoning. ”