INFERENCE

3.3.1 But let us leave this difficult matter and return to Descartes. The considerations
about inference which I summarized at the beginning of this chapter mean that a
Cartesian procedure, either in science or in morals, is doomed from the very start. If
any science is intended to give us conclusions of substance about matters of fact, then, if
its method is deductive, these conclusions must be implicit in the premisses. This
means that, before we fully understand the meanings of our Cartesian first principles,
we have to know that they (with the addition only of definitions of terms) entail such
various propositions as, that all mules are barren, or that a man's heart is on the lefthand side of his body, or that the sun is so many miles from the earth. But if all these
facts are implicit in the first principles, the latter can hardly be called self-evident. We
find out about facts like these at least in part by observation; no amount of reasoning
from axioms will take its place. The position of pure mathematics has been much
discussed and is still obscure; it seems best to regard the axioms of pure mathematics
and logic as definitive of the terms used in them. But this much, at any rate, may be
said, that if a science purports to tell us facts like the above, it cannot, like pure
mathematics, be based on deductive reasoning and nothing else. It was the mistake of
Descartes to assimilate to pure mathematics studies which are of a wholly different
character.
It does not follow, from the fact that deduction, whether in the form of pure
mathematics or of logic, cannot take the place of observation, that deduction is
therefore altogether useless as an adjunct to observation. Science makes use of
expressions which would be altogether meaningless unless we could deduce. The
sentence 'There are three gramme weights on the balance and no more' would be
meaningless to anyone who could not deduce from it 'There is one gramme weight on
the balance, and one other, and one other, and no more', and vice versa.
The same considerations hold good in ethics. Many of the ethical theories which have
been proposed in the past may without injustice be called 'Cartesian' in character; that
is to say, they try to deduce particular duties from some self-evident first principle.
Often factual observations are admitted among the premisses; but this, though it makes
the theories which admit them incompletely 'Cartesian', does not affect my argument. A
Cartesian procedure in morals is as illusory as it is in science. If we may take it that, as I
shall show later, a piece of genuinely evaluative moral reasoning must have as its endproduct an imperative of the form 'Do so-and-so', it follows that its principles must be
of such a kind that we can deduce such particular imperatives from them, in
conjunction with factual minor premisses.