6. State the difference between categorical, disjunctive and hypo

thetical judgments.

7. Show that we can not tell the character of a judgment by examining the proposition used to express it.

8. Show that children often believe things because of the mere presence of ideas in their minds.

9. What are necessary truths and necessary beliefs?

10. In what did the wisdom of Socrates consist?

II. What lesson does this teach us?

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.

1. Why is it important for us to believe what is true?

2. Have you observed beliefs in children that you could only explain by the theory stated in the text?

3. Have you observed a difference in children in this respect? Do some appear more ready to believe without reason than others?

LESSON XXXV.

REASONING.

Höffding on Children's Judgments.

We saw in the

last lesson that children tend to believe the first suggestion that comes into their minds, no matter from what source. Some psychologists go much farther than this. Höffding, for instance, says: "It must be with dawning consciousness as with dream consciousness - all that offers is at first taken for current coin,"1 since to such a consciousness there is no ground for a distinction between the world of possibility and the world of fact and reality. This argument is that, from the very nature of the mind, it follows that, in the beginning of its mental life, a child must accept its ideas or suggestions as true.2 But we

1 Outlines of Psychology, p. 131.

2 That acute critic and profound student of human nature, Walter Bagehot, wrote a suggestive paragraph on this point: "In true metaphysics, I believe that, contrary to common opinion, unbelief far oftener needs a reason and requires an effort than belief. Naturally, and if man were made according to the pattern of the logicians, he would say: 'When I see a valid argument, I will believe; and till I see such argument, I will not believe.' But, in fact, every idea vividly before us soon appears to us to be true, unless we keep our perceptions of the arguments which prove it untrue, and voluntarily coerce our minds to remember its falsehood. 'All clear ideas are true,' was for ages a philosophical maxim; and though no maxim can be more unsound, none can be more exactly conformable to

CHILDREN'S REASONING.

321

have here nothing to do with such a priori reasoning. Our business is to make a patient study of facts; to carefully observe children, in order that we may learn whether there is a tendency to believe as true every suggestion that enters their minds; and if so, to what extent. But here, as always, we must guard against the propensity which, as we have seen, is such an active principle of human nature- the disposition to let our beliefs run clean out of sight of the facts upon which they are based, and assert a universal conclusion upon the basis of a few observations of two or three children. Knowing the influ

ence of feeling on belief, one would naturally suppose that children would be more likely to show the tendency in reference to matters that excite their feelings. So far as my observations go, they tend to confirm the truth of this supposition. We should expect also that children of a decidedly emotional temperament would be more likely to show it than those of a quieter temperament. But plainly we have no right to an opinion on this point until we have observed a large number of children, or until we have carefully studied the results of competent observers.

But the child very soon begins

Children's Reasoning. to form judgments that we can put into quite a different class. When he sees a train coming, and runs into the house because he is afraid of it, his judgment, The train will hurt me if I stay in the yard, is the result of the

ordinary human nature. The child resolutely accepts every idea which passes through its brain as true; it has no distinct conception of an idea which is strong, bright, and permanent, but which is false too. The mere presentation of an idea, unless we are careful about it, or unless there is within some unusual resistance, makes us believe it."

mere presence of the suggestion in his mind. The suggestion, of course, is due to the association of ideas; the belief, however, is due, as we have just seen, to quite another cause. But when a child, who was burned by his soup yesterday, refuses to touch it to-day because he sees it smoking, his judgment, The soup will burn me if I put it in my mouth, is probably not to be explained in the same way. He does, of course, think of the possible burn because of the association of ideas, but he believes it because of a process that might be roughly described as follows: Yesterday's soup smoked and burned me; therefore to-day's soup, which smokes also, will burn me. He makes a judgment about past experience the ground of a judgment about future experience; he goes from the known to the unknown. A little boy once made the direct assertion, "Snow is sugar; for snow is white, and so is sugar.' Because snow and sugar are both white, he concluded that they are the

same.

991

Reasoning Defined. Let us see if we can find any judgment to serve as a basis or reason for the first one. Does the child think, The train will hurt me if I stay in the yard because other trains have hurt me there? or because mamma told me it would hurt me if I stayed there? No. He does not base the judgment on anything; he assumes it. He does not go from the known to the unknown; he assumes the unknown. His belief is not mediate reached through other beliefs but immediate. Now, the process of basing judgments on judgments of reaching beliefs through beliefs-is called reasoning. Reasoning, then, is the act of going from the

1 See Höffding's Psychology, p. 132.

REASONING OR ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 323

known to the unknown through other beliefs, of basing judgments on judgments, reaching beliefs through beliefs.

Difficulty of Determining whether an Action is the Result of Reasoning or of the Association of Ideas.— It is often impossible to tell whether a given action has been performed as the result of a mere process of association, or of a genuine reasoning process. Take the case just mentioned of the child who refuses to touch smoking soup because he was burned yesterday. I have explained his action as due to a reasoning process. But is any other explanation possible? Certainly. It is altogether possible that the perception of the smoking soup to-day makes him think of the soup of yesterday, and that, of the pain he experienced, and that this thought of the pain causes him to refrain from eating soup to-day all through merely mechanical association. If his mental processes were as I described them above, then he reasoned. But if his action is due to mechanical association alone, we can not describe his mental processes as consisting of a succession of related judgments, but of unrelated percepts and ideas which would have been judgments if they had been brought into certain definite relations with each other. "Yesterday's soup smoked and burned; therefore to-day's soup, which smokes also, will burn me" - may be regarded as a rough description of his mental process if he reasons. But if he does not reason, percept of to-day's soup, thought of yesterday's soup, yesterday's pain - these one after the other without being brought into judgments may be the elements in consciousness which precede his action. Even if he believes that the soup will burn him to-day because of his experience yesterday, but not because he sees any