ABSTRACT
This chapter considers certain general problems in connection with inference. According to some, inference is always from particular cases to other particular cases, and when a general proposition is employed in deductive inference, the general proposition serves only as a memorandum of individual cases observed, and the inference is really from those individual cases, and not from the general proposition. Inferences are not always from particulars nor are they always from the general, but they are sometimes from the one and sometimes from the other, and sometimes from both. There is a certain fundamental assumption of all inference which appears to have escaped attention except in so far as to mislead some logicians in their conception of the ultimate type of all inference. Deductive inference proper is inference from general propositions, so that neither of the extreme views is really correct.
