Page:Critique of Pure Reason 1855 Meiklejohn tr.djvu/147

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ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES.

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whether this or that did or did not stand under them, this again, could not be done otherwise than by means of a rule. But this rule, precisely because it is a rule, requires for itself direction from the faculty of judgment. Thus, it is evident, that the understanding is capable of being instructed by rules, but that the judgment is a peculiar talent, which does not, and cannot require tuition, but only exercise. This faculty is therefore the specific quality of the so-called mother-wit, the want of which no scholastic discipline can compensate. For although education may furnish, and, as it were, ingraft upon a limited understanding rules borrowed from other minds, yet the power of employing these rules correctly must belong to the pupil himself; and no rule which we can prescribe to him with this purpose, is, in the absence or deficiency of this gift of nature, secure from misuse.^[1] A physician therefore, a judge or a statesman, may have in his head many admirable pathological, juridical, or political rules, in a degree that may enable him to be a profound teacher in his particular science, and yet in the application of these rules, he may very possibly blunder,-either because he is wanting in natural judgment (though not in understanding), and whilst he can comprehend the general in abstracto, cannot distinguish whether a particular case in concreto ought to rank under the former; or because his faculty of judgment has not been sufficiently exercised by examples and real practice. Indeed, the grand and only use of examples, is to sharpen the judgment. For as regards the correctness and precision of the insight of the understanding, examples are commonly injurious rather than otherwise, because, as casus in terminis, they seldom adequately fulfil the conditions of the rule. Besides, they often weaken the power of our understanding to apprehend rules or laws in their universality, independently of particular circumstances of experience; and hence, accustom us to employ

↑ Deficiency in judgment is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy. A dull or narrow-minded person, to whom nothing is wanting but a proper degree of understanding, may be improved by tuition, even so far as to deserve the epithet of learned. But as such persons frequently labour under a deficiency in the faculty of judgment, it is not uncommon to find men extremely learned, who in the application of their science betray to a lamentable degree this irremediable want.

[1] Deficiency in judgment is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy. A dull or narrow-minded person, to whom nothing is wanting but a proper degree of understanding, may be improved by tuition, even so far as to deserve the epithet of learned. But as such persons frequently labour under a deficiency in the faculty of judgment, it is not uncommon to find men extremely learned, who in the application of their science betray to a lamentable degree this irremediable want.

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