ONE:An engineer may direct and control work without a knowledge of practical fitting, but such control is merely a commercial one, and cannot of course extend to mechanical details which are generally the vital part; the obedience that may thus be enforced in controlling others is not to be confounded with the respect which a superior knowledge of work commands."Party of the name of Lalage?" he said. "What do you know about him?"
ONE:127"That you shall know all in good time," Lawrence replied. "It's a pleasure to have you to do anything for one, Hetty. How quickly you took in my parable. It was rather paltry to talk over a child's head like that, but if ever there was a case when the end justifies the means this is one. Of course, you got it?"
ONE:We have also to note that Plotinus arrives at his Absolute by a method apparently very different from that pursued by either of his teachers. Platos primal beauty is, on the face of it, an abstraction and generalisation from all the scattered and imperfect manifestations of beauty to be met with in our objective experience. And Aristotle is led to his conception of an eternal immaterial thought by two lines of analysis, both starting from the phenomena of external Nature. The problem of his Physics is to account for the perpetuity of motion. The problem of his Metaphysics is to explain the transformation of potential into actual existence. Plotinus, on the other hand, is always bidding us look within. What we admire in the objective world is but a reflex of ourselves. Mind is the sole reality; and to grasp this reality under its highest form, we must become like it. Thus the more we isolate our own personality and self-identity from the other interests and experiences of life, the more nearly do we approach to consciousness of and coalescence with the supreme identity wherein all things have their source.However, as we have seen, he is not above turning it against Mill. The drift of his own illustration is not very clear, but we suppose it implies that the matron unconsciously frames the general proposition: My remedy is good for all children suffering from the same disease as Lucy; and with equal unconsciousness reasons down from this to the case of her neighbours child. Now, it is quite unjustifiable to call Mills analysis superficial because it leaves out of account a hypothesis incompatible with the nominalism which Mill professed. It is still more unjustifiable to quote against it390 the authority of a philosopher who perfectly agreed with those who disbelieve in the possibility of unconscious knowledge,286 and contemptuously rejected Platos opinion to the contrary. Nor is this all. The doctrine that reasoning is from particulars to particulars, even when it passes through general propositions, may be rigorously deduced from Aristotles own admissions. If nothing exists but particulars, and if knowledge is of what exists, then all knowledge is of particulars. Therefore, if the propositions entering into a chain of reasoning are knowledge, they must deal with particulars exclusively. And, quite apart from the later developments of Aristotles philosophy, we have his express assertion, that all generals are derived from particulars, which is absolutely incompatible with the alleged fact, that all knowledge, all thought, rests on universal truths, on general propositions; that all knowledge, whether deductive or inductive, is arrived at by the aid, the indispensable aid, of general propositions. To Aristotle the basis of knowledge was not truths of any kind, but concepts; and in the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics he has explained how these concepts are derived from sense-perceptions without the aid of any propositions whatever.
