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which made his name sound strangely familiar to us from our earliest infancy at Oxford, but which left him draped in all the mythical wonder and awe of a legendary hero. Few of us, as Freshmen, would not have felt a shock at identifying the creator of the Logic with any historic reality. Many of us would have felt no surprise or difficulty in conceiving him to be a later development of the Sun or the Dawn. Those curious Diagrams, that wild Poetry! how odd it all seemed, how mystic, how wonderful! so isolated, so unlike all else we had ever seen, it had the air and odour of some primæval fossil, a Rip van Winkle awakened out of the Past! Yet that work represents to us the sole thread by which Philosophy held its hold on Oxford; to it we owe it that the spirit of Speculative Thought has never wholly perished out of the educational course of this University. Logic is the shell of Thought—Logical formulae the Ritualism of Philosophy. By them, the Principle is asserted and made permanent; and thus, though the spirit of the Principle die away for a time, all is not wholly lost, for the records, the remembrances of the Past have been preserved; and so preserved that at any moment the revived spirit may recover at once, by means of the outward form, the old standing-ground to which that form was at once the witness and the guide. This is the history of Aldrich's Logic. At a time when the New Philosophy of Bacon was driving the withered relics of Scholasticism out of the field, and was prone, in the novel pride of its revolutionary Puritanism, to trample Idealism to death, Aldrich succeeded in so rescuing the naked symbols of a forgotten faith, that the sign of a higher presence could never be entirely withdrawn from Oxford. Baroko has been to us the
