Supposition

“ Such a supposition to the average man appears obviously possible, however much, for other reasons, he might decline to entertain it. And the assurance that his supposition is meaningless nonsense he rejects as contrary to what he calls common sense. ”

“ No, the two ideas can easily be seen to be one and the same; in each case it is red we are actually acquainted with, and the difference is in affirming or denying existence to the one idea. The difference is in our judgment, which may be affirmative or negative. A supposition is like a judgment in this respect; it may be either affirmative or negative, but it differs from a judgment in another respect, that while a judgment always conveys a conviction, always expresses belief or disbelief, a supposition does not—it is neither believed nor disbelieved. ”

“ But the usual supposition at the outset is that any judgment has by itself its own object, so that thereby alone, apart from other judgments, it stands or falls. And thus far we have tried to show that this natural supposition leads us into difficulty. We cannot see how a single sincere judgment should possibly fail to agree with its own chosen object. But enough of our problem in general. ”

“ They proceed upon a false supposition of life; as if we possessed not only a power over events and circumstances, but had a greater power over ourselves than I believe any of us will be found to possess. ”

“ The chief reason for supposing the principle true is that it seems scarcely possible to believe that we can make a judgment or entertain a supposition without knowing what it is that we are judging or supposing about. If we make a judgment about (say) Julius Cæsar, it is plain that the actual person who was Julius Cæsar is not a constituent of the judgment. But before going further, it may be well to explain what I mean when I say that this or that is a constituent of a judgment, or of a proposition which we understand. ”

“ But since, by supposition, the new individual has the marks, whether we have ascertained him to have them or not; if we have affirmed the major premise, we have asserted him to be mortal. Now my position is that this assertion can not be a necessary part of the argument. It can not be a necessary condition of reasoning that we should begin by making an assertion, which is afterward to be employed in proving a part of itself. ”

“ A supposition which is assumed to be true, or which is made without any hint as to its correctness, is expressed by the indicative. A supposition which is viewed by the speaker as untrue or unlikely is expressed by the subjunctive or a periphrase [87] for the subjunctive. When the character of the supposition makes the conclusion untrue or unlikely, the conclusion also is expressed by the subjunctive or a periphrase [87] for the subjunctive. The use of tenses is peculiar, as will be seen from the following table of a few common forms of conditional sentences. ”

“ Bearing this in mind, I think it must be admitted, that even when we have no knowledge whatever to guide our expectations, except the knowledge that what happens must be some one of a certain number of possibilities, we may still reasonably judge, that one supposition is more probable to us than another supposition ”

“ If, further, we turn from an abstract consideration of this supposition, and examine practically in the modern world men and women as they exist today, the irrationality of the supposition is yet more evident. ”

“ And anyhow why shouldn’t you accept the supposition. Do you look upon governesses as creatures above suspicion or necessarily of moral perfection? I suppose their hearts would not stand looking into much better than other people’s. ”

“ But if running through many conclusions, we come to none that are absurd, then we think the supposition probable; likewise we think probable whatsoever proposition we admit for truth by error of reasoning, or from trusting to other men. ”

“ Thus, suppose a man speaketh a thing upon supposition, or with exception, or in way of objection, or merely for disputation's sake, in order to the discussion or clearing of truth; he that should report him asserting it absolutely, unlimitedly, positively, and peremptorily, as his own settled judgment, would notoriously calumniate. ”

“ The real of being, its normal action, and the origin of all things to mortal sense is the unreal; whereas the unreal or imitative movements of this finite belief, that reverse the infinite modus and action, is self-styled the real, and whoever contradicts that supposition is a deceiver or deceived. ”

“ A conditional sentence is one that assumes what may or may not be true (in reality) , and bases on it some other statement (i. e., the supposition is assumed to be true) . Bt. 600-1; Gl. 645; Gn. 1381; H.A. 889.
2. A simple supposition implying nothing as to fulfillment, has the indicative (or an equivalent; Bt. 602, notes) in both clauses.
(1) If a specific sequence is made in present time, then the present indicative stands in both clauses. If in past time, a past indicative occurs in both clauses. ”

“ The reasonable mind, however, will ponder and consider each feature of the case, and will rather prefer to countenance a supposition based on ordinary experience than an explanation brought ready-made from the domain of the miraculous. ”

“ You could not expect anything else, you could not die without being menaced by this supposition, and your dying pillow would be made unhappy, you would know you had done wrong, and would expect somebody to measure to you the same measure pressed down, shook together, and running over. ”

“ The subjective mind being, by the supposition, but the obverse aspect of the sum total of such among objective relations as have had a share in its production, when, as in observation and reflection, this obverse aspect is again inverted upon its die, it naturally fits more or less exactly into all the prints. ”

“ To suppose a deception will not do. Such is possible, but there are twenty other suppositions more probable. They must all be set aside before we reach that point." "What are these twenty suppositions?" "It is needless to mention them. They are only less improbable than Pleyel's. Time may convert one of them into certainty. ”

“ If we find something in our own conduct at which we are secretly pleased, although we cannot reconcile it with experience, seeing that if we were to follow the guidance of experience we should have to do precisely the opposite, we must not allow this to put us out; otherwise we should be ascribing an authority to experience which it does not deserve, for all that it teaches rests upon a mere supposition. ”

“ The answer is, that the objects of thought about which we make judgments are suppositions, and our judgments {88} concern their fulfilment, and their fulfilment is a relation external to them—it is their agreement or disagreement with reality. ”

“ The great majority of these suppositions are too material, crude, shallow and baseless, on their very faces, to even challenge the attention of a thinker for a single moment; others are too far-fetched ”

“ Before looking at these conjectures, however, it is appropriate that we look first at what facts there are to justify them. Suppositions without any facts are mere fictions of the imagination, and this we are not indulging in. ”

“ In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief. ”

“ And the knowledge of what is requisite in sincere supplication is this: to punish yourself; to divest yourself of hearing; to reject evil-doing of all kinds; to have your eye fixed on one; to seek the road to the bestower of benefits; to desire without delay, and not to trifle. ”

“ There had seldom been a case in which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic—an apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the unvital and immaterial—as a preliminary to a swift volte-face by which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory which captivated and—for the moment—convinced. ”

“ And, for that, it was indispensable to prove that suppression is always a substitution and is even necessarily conceived as such: it is the requirements of practical life alone that suggest to us here a way of speaking that deceives us both as to what happens in things and as to what is present to our thought. ”

“ These three mental acts are Doubt, Inference, and Assent. A question is the expression of a doubt; a conclusion is the expression of an act of inference; and an assertion is the expression of an act of assent. To doubt, for instance, is not to see one’s way to hold that Free-trade is or that it is not a benefit; to infer, is to hold on sufficient grounds that Free-trade may, must, or should be a benefit; to assent to the proposition, is to hold that Free-trade is a benefit. ”

“ Would that I had the ability to write with the penetration and the clearness of statement that the [p.101] subject should certainly elicit, upon the strange equanimity with which mankind, in science or in practical life, receives and faces a direct negative or an open contradiction. Perhaps the habit of easy division into positive and negative, the ready resort to dichotomy, explains the mystery; perhaps the fact that negation or opposition is and can only be in kind, that there never is or can be any real change or need of change in a mere negation, is at least an important factor in the case ”

“ But, so far as we have been able to collect evidence, the general rule in any sudden catastrophe is that which we have described. There is nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which almost excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or otherwise of the situation. ”

“ The suppression and obscurity arrays a simple truth in a veil of something like guilt, that is altogether meretricious, as opposed to the matronly majesty of our Scripture, for instance; and the conceptions as they recede from distinctness of idea approximate to the nature of feeling, and gain thereby a closer and more immediate affinity with the appetites. ”

“ In theory you cannot indulge with consistency in an ultimate doubt. You are forced, willingly or not, at a certain point to assume infallibility. For, otherwise, how could you proceed to judge at all? ”

“ Every object has its appointed number of attributes, neither more nor less. To every question, whether it is this or that, there is, for any one who is thoroughly acquainted with it, a decisive Yes possible, or a decisive No,—so that there is an end of all doubt or hesitation on the subject. ”

“ But the name of the suppositio itself has no contradictory, except with reference to a wider and inclusive suppositio.
The difficulty of actual reasoning, not with symbols, but about matters of fact, does not arise from the principles of Logic, but sometimes from the obscurity or complexity of the facts, sometimes from the ambiguity or clumsiness of language, sometimes from the deficiency of our own minds in penetration, tenacity and lucidity. One must do one's best to study the facts, and not be too easily discouraged. ”

“ A great many of our assents are merely expressions of our personal likings, tastes, principles, motives, and opinions, as dictated by nature, or resulting from habit; in other words, they are acts and manifestations of self: now what is more rare than self-knowledge? ”

“ Our goal is reached, so far as the demonstrable truth is concerned, whenever we have found a series of propositions relating to the constitution of the realm of experience, and such that, as soon as you try to deny these propositions, you implicitly reaffirm them by your very attempt at denial. ”

“ In supporting the Logical Priority of Ma over Me it is laid down that falsehood of Premisses—of what comes first in an "explicit deduction," here Ma—involves falsehood of Conclusion, Me—of what comes last in the deduction; in other words, that truth of Conclusion implies truth of Premisses. ”

“ Nor do I speak, my lords, on this occasion, with that distrust and mental hesitation which are both natural and decent, when questions are dubious, when probability seems to be almost equally divided, when truth appears to hover between two parties, and by turns to favour every speaker; when specious arguments are urged on both sides, and the number of circumstances to be collected, and of relations to be adjusted, is so great, that an exact and indubitable decision is scarcely to be attained by human reason. ”

“ Doubt, which is tentative denial, like negation, which is completed denial, logically presupposes positive knowledge of some kind or other. It is never rational to doubt the truth of a specific proposition except on the strength of your possession of positive truth with which the suggested judgment appears to be in conflict. ”

“ Any argument which deceives us, by seeming to prove what it does not really prove, may be called a ‘Fallacy’ (derived from the Latin verb fallo “I deceive”) : but the particular kind, to be now discussed, consists of a Pair of Propositions, which are proposed as the Premisses of a Syllogism, but yield no Conclusion. ”

“ We merely draw a conclusion from what has happened in our own time, and one which may be said to be a clear inference from the circumstances of the case, and to which no one can offer any serious objection. ”

“ If we would determine what conclusion follows from the same ostensible premisses when the tacit assumption of real existence is left out, let us, according to the recommendation in the Westminster Review, substitute means for is. ”

“ They are ‘subjective’ because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content: they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us. ”

“ But it is enough that such assertions should be either contradictory to the known laws of nature, or exceed the limits of our experience, that their fallacy or irrelevancy to our consideration should be demonstrated. They persuade, indeed, only those who desire to be persuaded. ”