Item 149 - William Whewell to Richard Jones

3 pp.

Trinity College - WW offering a better word for catallactics [see WW to RJ, 25 Jan. 1832]. He hopes RJ goes 'on prosperously with your exhortation to his grace. I thought you seemed to be in a good vein in most of your criticism: the main danger which I saw, and which might be an imagination of my own, was that you might get into a wrangle about logic and induction'. WW will give him Cesalpinus's 'say about definitions it is good and remarkable but mixed up with a coordinate reference to induction which though very important for the subject will I think take too much developing for your review. The first question of his first book is - How we are to understand that we must proceed from universals to particulars (as Aristotle directs) seeing that parts alone are better known - and his answer is that we know the whole completely before we know the parts - we learn universals from particulars by induction - there are these shifts of our progress Induction, Division, Definition'. WW has found, among some of his papers, a packet from Edward Bromhead 'containing among other matters a sheet of observations on my First Principles of Mechanics, and another of notes on Political Economy, in which he expresses himself much disturbed at my having said in a previous letter that Definitions must come last - you see how hard a battle you or we have to fight'.