our special case in a
class which has known characteristics or consequences, you can then
apply the characteristics and consequences of the class to your special
case.

Where the class is recognized as having definite characteristics or
consequences, you can make your inference by showing that your case
falls within the class. Sometimes the stress of your reasoning will come
on making it clear that the consequence or characteristic on which your
reasoning depends really belongs to the class. If, for example, you were
arguing, as did the Class of '85 at Amherst College, that your college
should return to something like the old-fashioned classical education,
you would try to establish the fact that men who have had the
old-fashioned classical education are as a rule characterized by
intelligence, liberal culture, and open-mindedness. In such cases it is
the generalization on which the class is based which is the difficult
part of your task.

In general, however, if you can show your readers that the present case
belongs in a class of cases which can be recognized as belonging
together by virtue of definable characteristics, you have established an
excellent foundation for an inference based on those characteristics.

37. Reasoning by Causal Relation. Reasoning by generalization rises
greatly in certainty, however, whenever you can show the workings of
cause and effect. If a college receives every year from a certain school
a number of boys who are slack and lazy students, the dean of that
college may come to generalize and expect most of the boys from that
school to be poor timber. If, however, he finds that the master of the
school will take and keep any boy who lives in the town, he is able to
argue from this as a cause to the conclusion that the standards of the
school are low, and then from these low standards as a cause to the poor
quality of the graduates of the school.

Here is another example, from Professor James:

I am sitting in a railroad car, waiting for the train to start. It
is winter, and the stove fills the car with pungent smoke. The
brakeman enters, and my neighbor asks him to "stop that stove
smoking." He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as the car
begins to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It _always_ does,"
replies the brakeman. It is evident from this "always" that the
connection between car moving and smoke stopping was a purely
empirical one in t