ABSTRACT
Primâ facie inference resembles imagination in having to do with contents which are not and never have been given in apprehension. A content on this view is inferred when we are able to assert without having ever apprehended it. It may be or might have been inferred when, though it actually happens to have fallen under our observation, we should have been no whit the less in a position to assert it independently of this chance. The special business of inference is to give us a “new” fact, the word “new” meaning precisely that the fact in question is not contained in any observation hitherto made by the mind. But this again is ambiguous; and if the criterion of inference is the “novelty” of its conclusions, we must inquire further what precisely constitutes a new fact? What is contained in observation and memory? Where does memory cease and inference begin?
