ABSTRACT
We have now to bring together the main lines of argument in the preceding chapters, and to indicate the broad conclusions as to the nature, results, and postulates of inference which emerge therefrom. Broadly, we may say that the function of thought in inference is to connect the given, with the result of extending its knowledge over the wider reality which is not given. In the act of inference thought takes the actual relation as also a necessary relation, and as a fragment of a system of necessary relations. In this function thought has no system ready made, no criterion of necessity lying at hand to apply. It learns the concrete character of the system from the facts themselves, and hence by slow and laborious degrees with constant mistakes. Its only postulate is that there is a system; there are relations which are necessary. What the system is it must find out from the facts themselves.
