LOGIC (λογική, sc. τέχνη, the art of reasoning), the name given to one of the four main departments of philosophy, though its sphere is very variously delimited. The present article is divided into I. The Problems of Logic, II. History.
I. The Problems of Logic.
Introduction.—Logic is the science of the processes of inference. What, then, is inference? It is that mental operation which proceeds by combining two premises so as to cause a consequent conclusion. Some suppose that we may infer from one premise by a so-called “immediate inference.” But one premise can only reproduce itself in another form, e.g. all men are some animals; therefore some animals are men. It requires the combination of at least two premises to infer a conclusion different from both. There are as many kinds of inference as there are different ways of combining premises, and in the main three types:—
1. Analogical Inference, from particular to particular: e.g. border-war between Thebes and Phocis is evil; border-war between Thebes and Athens is similar to that between Thebes and Phocis; therefore, border-war between Thebes and Athens is evil.
2. Inductive Inference, from particular to universal: e.g. border-war between Thebes and Phocis is evil; all border-war is like that between Thebes and Phocis; therefore, all border-war is evil.
3. Deductive or Syllogistic Inference, from universal to particular, e.g. all border-war is evil; border-war between Thebes and Athens is border-war; therefore border-war between Thebes and Athens is evil.
In each of these kinds of inference there are three mental judgments capable of being expressed as above in three linguistic propositions; and the two first are the premises which are combined, while the third is the conclusion which is consequent on their combination. Each proposition consists of two terms, the subject and its predicate, united by the copula. Each inference contains three terms. In syllogistic inference the subject of the conclusion is the minor term, and its predicate the major term, while between these two extremes the term common to the two premises is the middle term, and the premise containing the middle and major terms is the major premise, the premise containing the middle and minor terms the minor premise. Thus in the example of syllogism given above, “border-war between Thebes and Athens” is the minor term, “evil” the major term, and “border-war” the middle term. Using S for minor, P for major and M for middle, and preserving these signs for corresponding terms in analogical and inductive inferences, we obtain the following formula of the three inferences:—
| Analogical. | Inductive. | Deductive or Syllogistic. | |
| S1 is P | S is P | Every | M is P |
| S2 is similar to S1 | Every M is similar to S | S is M | |
| ∴S2 is P. | ∴Every M is P. | ∴ | S is P. |
The love of unity has often made logicians attempt to resolve these three processes into one. But each process has a peculiarity of its own; they are similar, not the same. Analogical and inductive inference alike begin with a particular premise containing one or more instances; but the former adds a particular premise to draw a particular conclusion, the latter requires a universal premise to draw a universal conclusion. A citizen of Athens, who had known the evils of the border-war between Thebes and Phocis, would readily perceive the analogy of a similar war between Thebes and Athens, and conclude analogously that it would be evil; but he would have to generalize the similarity of all border-wars in order to draw the inductive conclusion that all alike are evil. Induction and deduction differ still more, and are in fact opposed, as one makes a particular premise the evidence of a universal conclusion, the other makes a universal premise evidence of a particular conclusion. Yet they are alike in requiring the generalization of the universal and the belief that there are classes which are whole numbers of similars. On this point both differ from inference by analogy, which proceeds entirely from particular premises to a particular conclusion. Hence we may redivide inference into particular inference by analogy and universal inference by induction and deduction. Universal inference is what we call reasoning; and its two species are very closely connected, because universal conclusions of induction become universal premises of deduction. Indeed, we often induce in order to deduce, ascending from particular to universal and descending from universal to particular in one act as it were; so that we may proceed either directly from particular to particular by analogical inference, or indirectly from particular through universal to particular by an inductive-deductive inference which might be called “perduction.” On the whole, then, analogical, inductive and deductive inferences are not the same but three similar and closely connected processes.
The three processes of inference, though different from one another, rest on a common principle of similarity of which each is a different application. Analogical inference requires that one particular is similar to another, induction that a whole number or class is similar to its particular instances, deduction that each particular is similar to the whole number or class. Not that these inferences require us to believe, or assume, or premise or formulate this principle either in general, or in its applied forms: the premises are all that any inference needs the mind to assume. The principle of similarity is used, not assumed by the inferring mind, which in accordance with the similarity of things and the parity of inference spontaneously concludes in the form that similars are similarly determined (“similia similibus convenire”). In applying this principle of similarity, each of the three processes in its own way has to premise both that something is somehow determined and that something is similar, and by combining these premises to conclude that this is similarly determined to that. Thus the very principle of inference by similarity requires it to be a combination of premises in order to draw a conclusion.
The three processes, as different applications of the principle of similarity, consisting of different combinations of premises, cause different degrees of cogency in their several conclusions. Analogy hardly requires as much evidence as induction. Men speculate about the analogy between Mars and the earth, and infer that it is inhabited, without troubling about all the planets. Induction has to consider more instances, and the similarity of a whole number or class. Even so, however, it starts from a particular premise which only contains many instances, and leaves room to doubt the universality of its conclusions. But deduction, starting from a premise about all the members of a class, compels a conclusion about every and each of necessity. One border-war may be similar to another, and the whole number may be similar, without being similarly evil; but if all alike are evil, each is evil of necessity. Deduction or syllogism is superior to analogy and induction in combining premises so as to involve or contain the conclusion. For this reason it has been elevated by some logicians above all other inferences, and for this very same reason attacked by others as no inference at all. The truth is that, though the premises contain the conclusion, neither premise alone contains it, and a man who knows both but does not combine them does not draw the conclusion; it is the synthesis of the two premises which at once contains the conclusion and advances our knowledge; and as syllogism consists, not indeed in the discovery, but essentially in the synthesis of two premises, it is an inference and an advance on each premise and on both taken separately. As again the synthesis contains or involves the conclusion, syllogism has the advantage of compelling assent to the consequences of the premises. Inference in general is a combination of premises to cause a conclusion; deduction is such a combination as to compel a conclusion involved in the combination, and following from the premises of necessity.
Nevertheless, deduction or syllogism is not independent of the other processes of inference. It is not the primary inference of its own premises, but constantly converts analogical and inductive conclusions into its particular and universal premises. Of itself it causes a necessity of consequence, but only a hypothetical necessity; if these premises are true, then this conclusion necessarily follows. To eliminate this “if” ultimately requires other inferences before deduction. Especially, induction to universals is the warrant and measure of deduction from universals. So far as it is inductively true that all border-war is evil, it is deductively true that a given border-war is therefore evil. Now, as an inductive combination of premises does not necessarily involve the inductive conclusion, induction normally leads, not to a necessary, but to a probable conclusion; and whenever its probable conclusions become deductive premises, the deduction only involves a probable conclusion. Can we then infer any certainty at all? In order to answer this question we must remember that there are many degrees of probability, and that induction, and therefore deduction, draw conclusions more or less probable, and rise to the point at which probability becomes moral certainty, or that high degree of probability which is sufficient to guide our lives, and even condemn murderers to death. But can we rise still higher and infer real necessity? This is a difficult question, which has received many answers. Some noölogists suppose a mental power of forming necessary principles of deduction a priori; but fail to show how we can apply principles of mind to things beyond mind. Some empiricists, on the other hand, suppose that induction only infers probable conclusions which are premises of probable deductions; but they give up all exact science. Between these extremes there is room for a third theory, empirical yet providing a knowledge of the really necessary. In some cases of induction concerned with objects capable of abstraction and simplification, we have a power of identification, by which, not a priori but in the act of inducing a conclusion, we apprehend that the things signified by its subject and predicate are one and the same thing which cannot exist apart from itself. Thus by combined induction and identification we apprehend that one and one are the same as two, that there is no difference between a triangle and a three-sided rectilineal figure, that a whole must be greater than its part by being the whole, that inter-resisting bodies necessarily force one another apart, otherwise they would not be inter-resisting but occupy the same place at the same moment. Necessary principles, discovered by this process of induction and identification, become premises of deductive demonstration to conclusions which are not only necessary consequents on the premises, but also equally necessary in reality. Induction thus is the source of deduction, of its truth, of its probability, of its moral certainty; and induction, combined with identification, is the origin of the necessary principles of demonstration or deduction to necessary conclusions.
Analogical inference in its turn is as closely allied with induction. Like induction, it starts from a particular premise, containing one or more examples or instances; but, as it is easier to infer a particular than a universal conclusion, it supplies particular conclusions which in their turn become further particular premises of induction. Its second premise is indeed merely a particular apprehension that one particular is similar to another, whereas the second premise of induction is a universal apprehension that a whole number of particulars is similar to those from which the inference starts; but at bottom these two apprehensions of similarity are so alike as to suggest that the universal premise of induction has arisen as a generalized analogy. It seems likely that man has arrived at the apprehension of a whole individual, e.g. a whole animal including all its parts, and thence has inferred by analogy a whole number, or class, e.g. of animals including all individual animals; and accordingly that the particular analogy of one individual to another has given rise to the general analogy of every to each individual in a class, or whole number of individuals, contained in the second premise of induction. In this case, analogical inference has led to induction, as induction to deduction. Further, analogical inference from particular to particular suggests inductive-deductive inference from particular through universal to particular.
Newton, according to Dr Pemberton, thought in 1666 that the moon moves so like a falling body that it has a similar centripetal force to the earth, 20 years before he demonstrated this conclusion from the laws of motion in the Principia. In fact, analogical, inductive and deductive inferences, though different processes of combining premises to cause different conclusions, are so similar and related, so united in principle and interdependent, so consolidated into a system of inference, that they cannot be completely investigated apart, but together constitute a single subject of science. This science of inference in general is logic.
Logic, however, did not begin as a science of all inference. Rather it began as a science of reasoning (λόγος), of syllogism (συλλογισμός), of deductive inference. Aristotle was its founder. He was anticipated of course by many generations of spontaneous thinking (logica naturalis). Many of the higher animals infer by analogy: otherwise we cannot explain their thinking. Man so infers at first: otherwise we cannot explain the actions of young children, who before they begin to speak give no evidence of universal thinking. It is likely that man began with particular inference and with particular language; and that, gradually generalizing thought and language, he learnt at last to think and say “all,” to infer universally, to induce and deduce, to reason, in short, and raise himself above other animals. In ancient times, and especially in Egypt, Babylon and Greece, he went on to develop reason into science or the systematic investigation of definite subjects, e.g. arithmetic of number, geometry of magnitude, astronomy of stars, politics of government, ethics of goods. In Greece he became more and more reflective and conscious of himself, of his body and soul, his manners and morals, his mental operations and especially his reason. One of the characteristics of Greek philosophers is their growing tendency, in investigating any subject, to turn round and ask themselves what should be the method of investigation. In this way the Presocratics and Sophists, and still more Socrates and Plato, threw out hints on sense and reason, on inferential processes and scientific methods which may be called anticipations of logic. But Aristotle was the first to conceive of reasoning itself as a definite subject of a special science, which he called analytics or analytic science, specially designed to analyse syllogism and especially demonstrative syllogism, or science, and to be in fact a science of sciences. He was therefore the founder of the science of logic.
Among the Aristotelian treatises we have the following, which together constitute this new science of reasoning:—
1. The Categories, or names signifying things which can become predicates;
2. The De Interpretatione, or the enumeration of conceptions and their combinations by (1) nouns and verbs (names), (2) enunciations (propositions);
3. The Prior Analytics, on syllogism;
4. The Posterior Analytics, on demonstrative syllogism, or science;
5. The Topics, on dialectical syllogism; or argument;
6. The Sophistical Elenchi, on sophistical or contentious syllogism, or sophistical fallacies.
So far as we know, Aristotle had no one name for all these investigations. “Analytics” is only applied to the Prior and Posterior Analytics, and “logical,” which he opposed to “analytical,” only suits the Topics and at most the Sophistical Elenchi; secondly, while he analyzed syllogism into premises, major and minor, and premises into terms, subject and predicate, he attempted no division of the whole science; thirdly, he attempted no order and arrangement of the treatises into a system of logic, but only of the Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Elenchi into a system of syllogisms. Nevertheless, when his followers had arranged the treatises into the Organon, as they called it to express that it is an instrument of science, then there gradually emerged a system of syllogistic logic, arranged in the triple division—terms, propositions and syllogisms—which has survived to this day as technical logic, and has been the foundation of all other logics, even of those which aim at its destruction.
The main problem which Aristotle set before him was the analysis of syllogism, which he defined as “reasoning in which certain things having been posited something different from them of necessity follows by their being those things” (Prior Analytics, i. 1). What then did he mean by reasoning, or rather by the Greek word λόγος of which “reasoning” is an approximate rendering? It was meant (cf. Post. An. i. 10) to be both internal, in the soul (ὁ ἔσω λόγος, ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ), and external, in language (ὁ ἔξω λόγος): hence after Aristotle the Stoics distinguished λόγος ἐνδιάθετος and προφορικός. It meant, then, both reason and discourse of reason (cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, i. 2). On its mental side, as reason it meant combination of thoughts. On its linguistic side, as discourse it was used for any combination of names to form a phrase, such as the definition “rational animal,” or a book, such as the Iliad. It had also the mathematical meaning of ratio; and in its use for definition it is sometimes transferred to essence as the object of definition, and has a mixed meaning, which may be expressed by “account.” In all its uses, however, the common meaning is combination. When Aristotle called syllogism λόγος, he meant that it is a combination of premises involving a conclusion of necessity. Moreover, he tended to confine the term λόγος to syllogistic inference. Not that he omitted other inferences (πίστεις). On the contrary, to him (cf. Prior Analytics, ii. 24) we owe the triple distinction into inference from particular to particular (παράδειγμα, example, or what we call “analogy”), inference from particular to universal (ἐπαγωγή, induction), and inference from universal to particular (συλλογισμός, syllogism, or deduction). But he thought that inferences other than syllogism are imperfect; that analogical inference is rhetorical induction; and that induction, through the necessary preliminary of syllogism and the sole process of ascent from sense, memory and experience to the principles of science, is itself neither reasoning nor science. To be perfect he thought that all inference must be reduced to syllogism of the first figure, which he regarded as the specially scientific inference. Accordingly, the syllogism appeared to him to be the rational process (μετὰ λόγου), and the demonstrative syllogism from inductively discovered principles to be science (ἐπιστήμη). Hence, without his saying it in so many words, Aristotle’s logic perforce became a logic of deductive reasoning, or syllogism. As it happened this deductive tendency helped the development of logic. The obscurer premises of analogy and induction, together with the paucity of experience and the backward state of physical science in Aristotle’s time would have baffled even his analytical genius. On the other hand, the demonstrations of mathematical sciences of his time, and the logical forms of deduction evinced in Plato’s dialogues, provided him with admirable examples of deduction, which is also the inference most capable of analysis. Aristotle’s analysis of the syllogism showed man how to advance by combining his thoughts in trains of deductive reasoning. Nevertheless, the wider question remained for logic: what is the nature of all inference, and the special form of each of its three main processes?
As then the reasoning of the syllogism was the main problem of Aristotle’s logic, what was his analysis of it? In distinguishing inner and outer reason, or reasoning and discourse, he added that it is not to outer reason but to inner reason in the soul that demonstration and syllogism are directed (Post. An. i. 10). One would expect, then, an analysis of mental reasoning into mental judgments (κρίσεις) as premises and conclusion. In point of fact, he analysed it into premises, but then analysed a premise into terms, which he divided into subject and predicate, with the addition of the copula “is” or “is not.” This analysis, regarded as a whole and as it is applied in the Analytics and in the other logical treatises, was evidently intended as a linguistic analysis. So in the Categories, he first divided things said (τὰ λεγόμενα) into uncombined and combined, or names and propositions, and then divided the former into categories; and in the De interpretatione he expressly excluded mental conceptions and their combinations, and confined himself to nouns and verbs and enunciations, or, as we should say, to names and propositions. Aristotle apparently intended, or at all events has given logicians in general the impression, that he intended to analyse syllogism into propositions as premises, and premise into names as terms. His logic therefore exhibits the curious paradox of being an analysis of mental reasoning into linguistic elements. The explanation is that outer speech is more obvious than inner thought, and that grammar and poetic criticism, rhetoric and dialectic preceded logic, and that out of those arts of language arose the science of reasoning. The sophist Protagoras had distinguished various kinds of sentences, and Plato had divided the sentence into noun and verb, signifying a thing and the action of a thing. Rhetoricians had enumerated various means of persuasion, some of which are logical forms, e.g. probability and sign, example and enthymeme. Among the dialecticians, Socrates had used inductive arguments to obtain definitions as data of deductive arguments against his opponents, and Plato had insisted on the processes of ascending to and descending from an unconditional principle by the power of giving and receiving argument. All these points about speech, eloquence and argument between man and man were absorbed into Aristotle’s theory of reasoning, and in particular the grammar of the sentence consisting of noun and verb caused the logic of the proposition consisting of subject and predicate. At the same time, Aristotle was well aware that the science of reasoning is no art of language and must take up a different position towards speech as the expression of thought. In the Categories he classified names, not, however, as a grammarian by their structure, but as a logician by their signification. In the De interpretatione, having distinguished the enunciation, or proposition, from other sentences as that in which there is truth or falsity, he relegated the rest to rhetoric or poetry, and founded the logic of the proposition, in which, however, he retained the grammatical analysis into noun and verb. In the Analytics he took the final step of originating the logical analysis of the proposition as premise into subject and predicate as terms mediated by the copula, and analysed the syllogism into these elements. Thus did he become the founder of the logical but linguistic analysis of reasoning as discourse (ὁ ἔξω λόγος) into propositions and terms. Nevertheless, the deeper question remained, what is the logical but mental analysis of reasoning itself (ὁ ἔσω λόγος) into its mental premises and conclusion?
Aristotle thus was the founder of logic as a science. But he laid too much stress on reasoning as syllogism or deduction, and on deductive science; and he laid too much stress on the linguistic analysis of rational discourse into proposition and terms. These two defects remain ingrained in technical logic to this day. But in the course of the development of the science, logicians have endeavoured to correct those defects, and have diverged into two schools. Some have devoted themselves to induction from sense and experience and widened logic till it has become a general science of inference and scientific method. Others have devoted themselves to the mental analysis of reasoning, and have narrowed logic into a science of conception, judgment and reasoning. The former belong to the school of empirical logic, the latter to the school of conceptual and formal logic. Both have started from points which Aristotle indicated without developing them. But we shall find that his true descendants are the empirical logicians.
Aristotle was the first of the empiricists. He consistently maintained that sense is knowledge of particulars and the origin of scientific knowledge of universals. In his view, sense is a congenital form of judgment (δύναμις σύμφυτος κριτική, Post. An. ii. 19); a sensation of each of the five senses is always true of its proper object; without sense there is no science; sense is the origin of induction, which is the origin of deduction and science. The Analytics end (Post. An. ii. 19) with a detailed system of empiricism, according to which sense is the primary knowledge of particulars, memory is the retention of a sensation, experience is the sum of many memories, induction infers universals, and intelligence is the true apprehension of the universal principles of science, which is rational, deductive, demonstrative, from empirical principles.
This empirical groundwork of Aristotle’s logic was accepted by the Epicureans, who enunciated most distinctly the fundamental doctrine that all sensations are true of their immediate objects, and falsity begins with subsequent opinions, or what the moderns call “interpretation.” Beneath deductive logic, in the logic of Aristotle and the canonic of the Epicureans, there already lay the basis of empirical logic: sensory experience is the origin of all inference and science. It remained for Francis Bacon to develop these beginnings into a new logic of induction. He did not indeed accept the infallibility of sense or of any other operation unaided. He thought, rather, that every operation becomes infallible by method. Following Aristotle in this order—sense, memory, intellect—he resolved the whole process of induction into three ministrations:—
1. The ministration to sense, aided by observation and experiment.
2. The ministration to memory, aided by registering and arranging the data, of observation and experiment in tables of instances of agreement, difference and concomitant variations.
3. The ministration to intellect or reason, aided by the negative elimination by means of contradictory instances of whatever in the instances is not always present, absent and varying with the given subject investigated, and finally by the positive inference that whatever in the instances is always present, absent and varying with the subject is its essential cause.
Bacon, like Aristotle, was anticipated in this or that point; but, as Aristotle was the first to construct a system of deduction in the syllogism and its three figures, so Bacon was the first to construct a system of induction in three ministrations, in which the requisites of induction, hitherto recognized only in sporadic hints, were combined for the first time in one logic of induction. Bacon taught men to labour in inferring from particular to universal, to lay as much stress on induction as on deduction, and to think and speak of inductive reasoning, inductive science, inductive logic. Moreover, while Aristotle had the merit of discerning the triplicity of inference, to Bacon we owe the merit of distinguishing the three processes without reduction:—
1. Inference from particular to particular by Experientia Literata, in plano;
2. Inference from particular to universal by Inductio, ascendendo;
3. Inference from universal to particular by Syllogism, descendendo.
In short, the comprehensive genius of Bacon widened logic into a general science of inference.
On the other hand, as Aristotle over-emphasized deduction so Bacon over-emphasized induction by contending that it is the only process of discovering universals (axiomata), which deduction only applies to particulars. J. S. Mill in his Logic pointed out this defect, and without departing from Baconian principles remedied it by quoting scientific examples, in which deduction, starting from inductive principles, applies more general to less general universals, e.g. when the more general law of gravitation is shown to include the less general laws of planetary gravitation. Mill’s logic has the great merit of copiously exemplifying the principles of the variety of method according to subject-matter. It teaches us that scientific method is sometimes induction, sometimes deduction, and sometimes the consilience of both, either by the inductive verification of previous deductions, or by the deductive explanation of previous inductions.
It is also most interesting to notice that Aristotle saw further than Bacon in this direction. The founder of logic anticipated the latest logic of science, when he recognized, not only the deduction of mathematics, but also the experience of facts followed by deductive explanations of their causes in physics.
The consilience of empirical and deductive processes was an Aristotelian discovery, elaborated by Mill against Bacon. On the whole, however, Aristotle, Bacon and Mill, purged from their errors, form one empirical school, gradually growing by adapting itself to the advance of science; a school in which Aristotle was most influenced by Greek deductive Mathematics, Bacon by the rise of empirical physics at the Renaissance, and Mill by the Newtonian combination of empirical facts and mathematical principles in the Principia. From studying this succession of empirical logicians, we cannot doubt that sense, memory and experience are the real origin of inference, analogical, inductive and deductive. The deepest problem of logic is the relation of sense and inference. But we must first consider the mental analysis of inference, and this brings us to conceptual and formal logic.
Aristotle’s logic has often been called formal logic; it was really a technical logic of syllogism analysed into linguistic elements, and of science rested on an empirical basis. At the same time his psychology, though maintaining his empiricism, contained some seeds of conceptual logic, and indirectly of formal logic. Intellectual development, which according to the logic of the Analytics consists of sense, memory, experience, induction and intellect, according to the psychology of the De Anima consists of sense, imagination and intellect, and one division of intellect is into conception of the undivided and combination of conceptions as one (De An. iii. 6). The De Interpretatione opens with a reference to this psychological distinction, implying that names represent conceptions, propositions represent combinations of conceptions. But the same passage relegates conceptions and their combinations to the De Anima, and confines the De Interpretatione to names and propositions in conformity with the linguistic analysis which pervades the logical treatises of Aristotle, who neither brought his psychological distinction between conceptions and their combinations into his logic, nor advanced the combinations of conceptions as a definition of judgment (κρίσις), nor employed the mental distinction between conceptions and judgments as an analysis of inference, or reasoning, or syllogism: he was no conceptual logician. The history of logic shows that the linguistic distinction between terms and propositions was the sole analysis of reasoning in the logical treatises of Aristotle; that the mental distinction between conceptions (ἔννοιαι) and judgments (ἀξιώματα in a wide sense) was imported into logic by the Stoics; and that this mental distinction became the logical analysis of reasoning under the authority of St Thomas Aquinas. In his commentary on the De Interpretatione, St Thomas, after citing from the De Anima Aristotle’s “duplex operatio intellectus,” said, “Additur autem et tertia operatio, scilicet ratiocinandi,” and concluded that, since logic is a rational science (rationalis scientia), its consideration must be directed to all these operations of reason. Hence arose conceptual logic; according to which conception is a simple apprehension of an idea without belief in being or not being, e.g. the idea of man or of running; judgment is a combination of conceptions, adding being or not being, e.g. man is running or not running; and reasoning is a combination of judgments: conversely, there is a mental analysis of reasoning into judgments, and judgment into conceptions, beneath the linguistic analysis of rational discourse into propositions, and propositions into terms. Logic, according to this new school, which has by our time become an old school, has to co-ordinate these three operations, direct them, and, beginning with conceptions, combine conceptions into judgments, and judgments into inference, which thus becomes a complex combination of conceptions, or, in modern parlance, an extension of our ideas. Conceptual logicians were, indeed, from the first aware that sense supplies the data, and that judgment and therefore inference contains belief that things are or are not. But they held, and still hold that sensation and conception are alike mere apprehensions, and that the belief that things are or are not arises somehow after sensation and conception in judgment, from which it passes into inference. At first, they were more sanguine of extracting from these unpromising beginnings some knowledge of things beyond ideas. But at length many of them became formal logicians, who held that logic is the investigation of formal thinking, or consistent conception, judgment and reasoning; that it shows how we infer formal truths of consistency without material truth of signifying things; that, as the science of the form or process, it must entirely abstract from the matter, or objects, of thought; and that it does not tell us how we infer from experience. Thus has logic drifted further and further from the real and empirical logic of Aristotle the founder and Bacon the reformer of the science.
The great merit of conceptual logic was the demand for a mental analysis of mental reasoning, and the direct analysis of reasoning into judgments which are the sole premises and conclusions of reasoning and of all mental inferences. Aristotle had fallen into the paradox of resolving a mental act into verbal elements. The Schoolmen, however, gradually came to realize that the result to their logic was to make it a sermocionalis scientia, and to their metaphysics the danger of nominalism. St Thomas made a great advance by making logic throughout a rationalis scientia; and logicians are now agreed that reasoning consists of judgments, discourse of propositions. This distinction is, moreover, vital to the whole logic of inference, because we always think all the judgments of which our inference consists, but seldom state all the propositions by which it is expressed. We omit propositions, curtail them, and even express a judgment by a single term, e.g. “Good!” “Fire!”. Hence the linguistic expression is not a true measure of inference; and to say that an inference consists of two propositions causing a third is not strictly true. But to say that it is two judgments causing a third is always true, and the very essence of inference, because we must think the two to conclude the third in “the sessions of sweet silent thought.” Inference, in short, consists of actual judgments capable of being expressed in propositions.
Inference always consists of judgments. But judgment does not always consist of conceptions. It is not a combination of conceptions; it does not arise from conceptions, nor even at first require conception. Sense is the origin of judgment. One who feels pained or pleased, who feels hot or cold or resisting in touch, who tastes the flavoured, who smells the odorous, who hears the sounding, who sees the coloured, or is conscious, already believes that something sensible exists before conception, before inference, and before language; and his belief is true of the immediate object of sense, the sensible thing, e.g. the hot felt in touch. But a belief in the existence of something is a judgment and a categorical judgment of existence. Sense, then, outer and inner, or sensation and consciousness, is the origin of sensory judgments which are true categorical beliefs in the existence of sensible things; and primary judgments are such true categorical sensory beliefs that things exist, and neither require conception nor are combinations of conceptions. Again, since sense is the origin of memory and experience, memorial and experiential judgments are categorical and existential judgments, which so far as they report sensory judgments are always true. Finally, since sense, memory and experience are the origin of inference, primary inference is categorical and existential, starting from sensory, memorial and experiential judgments as premises, and proceeding to inferential judgments as conclusions, which are categorical and existential, and are true, so far as they depend on sense, memory and experience.
Sense, then, is the origin of judgment; and the consequence is that primary judgments are true, categorical and existential judgments of sense, and primary inferences are inferences from categorical and existential premises to categorical and existential conclusions, which are true so far as they arise from outer and inner sense, and proceed to things similar to sensible things. All other judgments and inferences about existing things, or ideas, or names, whether categorical or hypothetical, are afterthoughts, partly true and partly false.
Sense, then, because it involves a true belief in existence is fitted to be the origin of judgment. Conception on the other hand is the simple apprehension of an idea, particular or universal, but without belief that anything is or is not, and therefore is unfitted to beget judgment. Nor could a combination of conceptions make a difference so fundamental as that between conceiving and believing. The most that it could do would be to cause an ideal judgment, e.g. that the idea of a centaur is the idea of a man-horse; and even here some further origin is needed for the addition of the copula “is.”
So far from being a cause, conception is not even a condition of all judgments; a sensation of hot is sufficient evidence that hot exists, before the idea of hot is either present or wanted. Conception is, however, a condition of a memorial judgment: in order to remember being hot, we require an idea of hot. Memory, however, is not that idea, but involves a judgment that there previously existed the hot now represented by the idea, which is about the sensible thing beyond the conceived idea; and the cause of this memorial judgment is past sense and present memory. So sense, memory and experience, the sum of sense and memory, though requiring conception, are the causes of the experiential judgment that there exist and have existed many similar, sensible things, and these sensory, memorial and experiential judgments about the existence of past and present sensible things beyond conceived ideas become the particular premises of primary inference. Starting from them, inference is enabled to draw conclusions which are inferential judgments about the existence of things similar to sensible things beyond conceived ideas. In rising, however, from particular to universal inference, induction, as we have seen, adds to its particular premise, S is P, a universal premise, every M is similar to S, in order to infer the universal conclusion, every M is P. This universal premise requires a universal conception of a class or whole number of similar particulars, as a condition. But the premise is not that conception; it is a belief that there is a whole number of particulars similar to those already experienced. The generalization of a class is not, as the conceptual logic assumes, the abstraction of a general idea, but an inference from the analogy of a whole individual thing, e.g. a whole man, to a whole number of similar individuals, e.g. the whole of men. The general idea of all men or the combination that the idea of all men is similar to the idea of particular men would not be enough; the universal premise that all men in fact are similar to those who have died is required to induce the universal conclusion that all men in fact die. Universal inference thus requires particular and universal conceptions as its condition; but, so far as it arises from sense, memory, experience, and involves generalization, it consists of judgments which do not consist of conceptions, but are beliefs in things existing beyond conception. Inference then, so far as it starts from categorical and existential premises, causes conclusions, or inferential judgments, which require conceptions, but are categorical and existential judgments beyond conception. Moreover, as it becomes more deductive, and causes conclusions further from sensory experience, these inferential judgments become causes of inferential conceptions. For example, from the evidence of molar changes due to the obvious parts of bodies, science first comes to believe in molecular changes due to imperceptible particles, and then tries to conceive the ideas of particles, molecules, atoms, electrons. The conceptual logic supposes that conception always precedes judgment; but the truth is that sensory judgment begins and inferential judgment ends by preceding conception. The supposed triple order—conception, judgment, reasoning—is defective and false. The real order is sensation and sensory judgment, conception, memory and memorial judgment, experience and experiential judgment, inference, inferential judgment, inferential conception. This is not all: inferential conceptions are inadequate, and finally fail. They are often symbolical; that is, we conceive one thing only by another like it, e.g. atoms by minute bodies not nearly small enough. Often the symbol is not like. What idea can the physicist form of intraspatial ether? What believer in God pretends to conceive Him as He really is? We believe many things that we cannot conceive; as Mill said, the inconceivable is not the incredible; and the point of science is not what we can conceive but what we should believe on evidence. Conception is the weakest, judgment the strongest power of man’s mind. Sense before conception is the original cause of judgment; and inference from sense enables judgment to continue after conception ceases. Finally, as there is judgment without conception, so there is conception without judgment. We often say “I understand, but do not decide.” But this suspension of judgment is a highly refined act, unfitted to the beginning of thought. Conception begins as a condition of memory, and after a long continuous process of inference ends in mere ideation. The conceptual logic has made the mistake of making ideation a stage in thought prior to judgment.
It was natural enough that the originators of conceptual logic, seeing that judgments can be expressed by propositions, and conceptions by terms, should fall into the error of supposing that, as propositions consist of terms, so judgments consist of conceptions, and that there is a triple mental order—conception, judgment, reasoning—parallel to the triple linguistic order—term, proposition, discourse. They overlooked the fact that man thinks long before he speaks, makes judgments which he does not express at all, or expresses them by interjections, names and phrases, before he uses regular propositions, and that he does not begin by conceiving and naming, and then proceed to believing and proposing. Feeling and sensation, involving believing or judging, come before conception and language. As conceptions are not always present in judgment, as they are only occasional conditions, and as they are unfitted to cause beliefs or judgments, and especially judgments of existence, and as judgments both precede conceptions in sense and continue after them in inference, it follows that conceptions are not the constituents of judgment, and judgment is not a combination of conceptions. Is there then any analysis of judgment? Paradoxical as it may sound, the truth seems to be that primary judgment, beginning as it does with the simplest feeling and sensation, is not a combination of two mental elements into one, but is a division of one sensible thing into the thing itself and its existence and the belief that it is determined as existing, e.g. that hot exists, cold exists, the pained exists, the pleased exists. Such a judgment has a cause, namely sense, but no mental elements. Afterwards come judgments of complex sense, e.g. that the existing hot is burning or becoming more or less hot, &c. Thus there is a combination of sensations causing the judgment; but the judgment is still a division of the sensible thing into itself and its being, and a belief that it is so determined. Afterwards follow judgments arising from more complex causes, e.g. memory, experience, inference. But however complicated these mental causes, there still remain these points common to all judgment:—(1) The mental causes of judgment are sense, memory, experience and inference; while conception is a condition of some judgments. (2) A judgment is not a combination either of its causes or of its conditions, e.g. it is not a combination of sensations any more than of ideas. (3) A judgment is a unitary mental act, dividing not itself but its object into the object itself and itself as determined, and signifying that it is so determined. (4) A primary judgment is a judgment that a sensible thing is determined as existing; but later judgments are concerned with either existing things, or with ideas, or with words, and signify that they are determined in all sorts of ways. (5) When a judgment is expressed by a proposition, the proposition expresses the results of the division by two terms, subject and predicate, and by the copula that what is signified by the subject is what is signified by the predicate; and the proposition is a combination of the two terms; e.g. border war is evil. (6) A complex judgment is a combination of two judgments, and may be copulative, e.g. you and I are men, or hypothetical, or disjunctive, &c.
Empirical logic, the logic of Aristotle and Bacon, is on the right way. It is the business of the logician to find the causes of the judgments which form the premises and the conclusions of inference, reasoning and science. What knowledge do we get by sense, memory and experience, the first mental causes of judgment? What is judgment, and what its various kinds? What is inference, how does it proceed by combining judgments as premises to cause judgments as conclusions, and what are its various kinds? How does inference draw conclusions more or less probable up to moral certainty? How does it by the aid of identification convert probable into necessary conclusions, which become necessary principles of demonstration? How is categorical succeeded by conditional inference? What is scientific method as a system of inferences about definite subjects? How does inference become the source of error and fallacy? How does the whole process from sense to inference discover the real truth of judgments, which are true so far as they signify things known by sense, memory, experience and inference? These are the fundamental questions of the science of inference. Conceptual logic, on the other hand, is false from the start. It is not the first business of logic to direct us how to form conceptions signified by terms, because sense is a prior cause of judgment and inference. It is not the second business of logic to direct us how out of conceptions to form judgments signified by propositions, because the real causes of judgments are sense, memory, experience and inference. It is, however, the main business of logic to direct us how out of judgments to form inferences signified by discourse; and this is the one point which conceptual logic has contributed to the science of inference. But why spoil the further mental analysis of inference by supposing that conceptions are constituents of judgment and therefore of inference, which thus becomes merely a complex combination of conceptions, an extension of ideas? The mistake has been to convert three operations of mind into three processes in a fixed order—conception, judgment, inference. Conception and judgment are decisions: inference alone is a process, from decisions to decision, from judgments to judgment. Sense, not conception, is the origin of judgment. Inference is the process which from judgments about sensible things proceeds to judgments about things similar to sensible things. Though some conceptions are its conditions and some judgments its causes, inference itself in its conclusions causes many more judgments and conceptions. Finally, inference is an extension, not of ideas, but of beliefs, at first about existing things, afterwards about ideas, and even about words; about anything in short about which we think, in what is too fancifully called “the universe of discourse.”
Formal logic has arisen out of the narrowness of conceptual logic. The science of inference no doubt has to deal primarily with formal truth or the consistency of premises and conclusion. But as all truth, real as well as formal, is consistent, formal rules of consistency become real rules of truth, when the premises are true and the consistent conclusion is therefore true. The science of inference again rightly emphasizes the formal thinking of the syllogism in which the combination of premises involves the conclusion. But the combinations of premises in analogical and inductive inference, although the combination does not involve the conclusion, yet causes us to infer it, and in so similar a way that the science of inference is not complete without investigating all the combinations which characterize different kinds of inference. The question of logic is how we infer in fact, as well as perfectly; and we cannot understand inference unless we consider inferences of probability of all kinds. Moreover, the study of analogical and inductive inference is necessary to that of the syllogism itself, because they discover the premises of syllogism. The formal thinking of syllogism alone is merely necessary consequence; but when its premises are necessary principles, its conclusions are not only necessary consequents but also necessary truths. Hence the manner in which induction aided by identification discovers necessary principles must be studied by the logician in order to decide when the syllogism can really arrive at necessary conclusions. Again, the science of inference has for its subject the form, or processes, of thought, but not its matter or objects. But it does not follow that it can investigate the former without the latter. Formal logicians say that, if they had to consider the matter, they must either consider all things, which would be impossible, or select some, which would be arbitrary. But there is an intermediate alternative, which is neither impossible nor arbitrary; namely, to consider the general distinctions and principles of all things; and without this general consideration of the matter the logician cannot know the form of thought, which consists in drawing inferences about things on these general principles. Lastly, the science of inference is not indeed the science of sensation, memory and experience, but at the same time it is the science of using those mental operations as data of inference; and, if logic does not show how analogical and inductive inferences directly, and deductive inferences indirectly, arise from experience, it becomes a science of mere thinking without knowledge.
Logic is related to all the sciences, because it considers the common inferences and varying methods used in investigating different subjects. But it is most closely related to the sciences of metaphysics and psychology, which form with it a triad of sciences. Metaphysics is the science of being in general, and therefore of the things which become objects apprehended by our minds. Psychology is the science of mind in general, and therefore of the mental operations, of which inference is one. Logic is the science of the processes of inference. These three sciences, of the objects of mind, of the operations of mind, of the processes used in the inferences of mind, are differently, but closely related, so that they are constantly confused. The real point is their interdependence, which is so intimate that one sign of great philosophy is a consistent metaphysics, psychology and logic. If the world of things is known to be partly material and partly mental, then the mind must have powers of sense and inference enabling it to know these things, and there must be processes of inference carrying us from and beyond the sensible to the insensible world of matter and mind. If the whole world of things is matter, operations and processes of mind are themselves material. If the whole world of things is mind, operations and processes of mind have only to recognize their like all the world over. It is clear then that a man’s metaphysics and psychology must colour his logic. It is accordingly necessary to the logician to know beforehand the general distinctions and principles of things in metaphysics, and the mental operations of sense, conception, memory and experience in psychology, so as to discover the processes of inference from experience about things in logic.
The interdependence of this triad of sciences has sometimes led to their confusion. Hegel, having identified being with thought, merged metaphysics in logic. But he divided logic into objective and subjective, and thus practically confessed that there is one science of the objects and another of the processes of thought. Psychologists, seeing that inference is a mental operation, often extemporize a theory of inference to the neglect of logic. But we have a double consciousness of inference. We are conscious of it as one operation among many, and of its omnipresence, so to speak, to all the rest. But we are also conscious of the processes of the operation of inference. To a certain extent this second consciousness applies to other operations: for example, we are conscious of the process of association by which various mental causes recall ideas in the imagination. But how little does the psychologist know about the association of ideas, compared with what the logician has discovered about the processes of inference! The fact is that our primary consciousness of all mental operations is hardly equal to our secondary consciousness of the processes of the one operation of inference from premises to conclusions permeating long trains and pervading whole sciences. This elaborate consciousness of inferential process is the justification of logic as a distinct science, and is the first step in its method. But it is not the whole method of logic, which also and rightly considers the mental process necessary to language, without substituting linguistic for mental distinctions.
Nor are consciousness and linguistic analysis all the instruments of the logician. Logic has to consider the things we know, the minds by which we know them from sense, memory and experience to inference, and the sciences which systematize and extend our knowledge of things; and having considered these facts, the logician must make such a science of inference as will explain the power and the poverty of human knowledge.
General Tendencies of Modern Logic
There are several grounds for hope in the logic of our day. In the first place, it tends to take up an intermediate position between the extremes of Kant and Hegel. It does not, with the former, regard logic as purely formal in the sense of abstracting thought from being, nor does it follow the latter in amalgamating metaphysics with logic by identifying being with thought. Secondly, it does not content itself with the mere formulae of thinking, but pushes forward to theories of method, knowledge and science; and it is a hopeful sign to find this epistemological spirit, to which England was accustomed by Mill, animating German logicians such as Lotze, Dühring, Schuppe, Sigwart and Wundt. Thirdly, there is a determination to reveal the psychological basis of logical processes, and not merely to describe them as they are in adult reasoning, but to explain also how they arise from simpler mental operations and primarily from sense. This attempt is connected with the psychological turn given to recent philosophy by Wundt and others, and is dangerous only so far as psychology itself is hypothetical. Unfortunately, however, these merits are usually connected with a less admirable characteristic—contempt for tradition, Writing his preface to his second edition in 1888, Sigwart says: “Important works have appeared by Lotze, Schuppe, Wundt and Bradley, to name only the most eminent; and all start from the conception which has guided this attempt. That is, logic is grounded by them, not upon an effete tradition but upon a new investigation of thought as it actually is in its psychological foundations, in its significance for knowledge, and its actual operation in scientific methods.” How strange! The spirit of every one of the three reforms above enumerated is an unconscious return to Aristotle’s Organon. Aristotle’s was a logic which steered, as Trendelenburg has shown, between Kantian formalism and Hegelian metaphysics; it was a logic which in the Analytics investigated the syllogism as a means to understanding knowledge and science: it was a logic which, starting from the psychological foundations of sense, memory and experience, built up the logical structure of induction and deduction on the profoundly Aristotelian principle that “there is no process from universals without induction, and none by induction without sense.” Wundt’s comprehensive view that logic looks backwards to psychology and forward to epistemology was hundreds of years ago one of the many discoveries of Aristotle.
Judgment
1. Judgment and Conception.—The emphasis now laid on judgment, the recovery from Hume’s confusion of beliefs with ideas and the association of ideas, and the distinction of the mental act of judging from its verbal expression in a proposition, are all healthy signs in recent logic. The most fundamental question, before proceeding to the investigation of inference, is not what we say but what we think in making the judgments which, whether we express them in propositions or not, are both the premises and the conclusion of inference; and, as this question has been diligently studied of late, but has been variously answered, it will be well to give a list of the more important theories of judgment as follows:—
a. It expresses a relation between the content of two ideas, not a relation of these ideas (Lotze).
b. It is consciousness concerning the objective validity of a subjective combination of ideas, i.e. whether between the corresponding objective elements an analogous combination exists (Ueberweg).
c. It is the synthesis of ideas into unity and consciousness of their objective validity, not in the sense of agreement with external reality but in the sense of the logical necessity of their synthesis (Sigwart).
d. It is the analysis of an aggregate idea (Gesammtvorstellung) into subject and predicate; based on a previous association of ideas, on relating and comparing, and on the apperceptive synthesis of an aggregate idea in consequence; but itself consisting in an apperceptive analysis of that aggregate idea; and requiring will in the form of apperception or attention (Wundt).
e. It requires an idea, because every object is conceived as well as recognized or denied; but it is itself an assertion of actual fact, every perception counts for a judgment, and every categorical is changeable into an existential judgment without change of sense (Brentano, who derives his theory from Mill except that he denies the necessity of a combination of ideas, and reduces a categorical to an existential judgment).
f. It is a decision of the validity of an idea requiring will (Bergmann, following Brentano).
g. Judgment (Urtheil) expresses that two ideas belong together: “by-judgment” (Beurtheilung) is the reaction of will expressing the validity or invalidity of the combination of ideas (Windelband, following Bergmann, but distinguishing the decision of validity from the judgment).
h. Judgment is consciousness of the identity or difference and of the causal relations of the given; naming the actual combinations of the data, but also requiring a priori categories of the understanding, the notions of identity, difference and causality, as principles of thought or laws, to combine the plurality of the given into a unity (Schuppe).
i. Judgment is the act which refers an ideal content recognized as such to a reality beyond the act, predicating an idea of a reality, a what of a that; so that the subject is reality and the predicate the meaning of an idea, while the judgment refers the idea to reality by an identity of content (Bradley and Bosanquet).
k. Judgment is an assertion of reality, requiring comparison and ideas which render it directly expressible in words (Hobhouse, mainly following Bradley).
These theories are of varying value in proportion to their proximity to Aristotle’s point that predication is about things, and to Mill’s point that judgments and propositions are about things, not about ideas. The essence of judgment is belief that something is (or is not) determined, either as existing (e.g. “I am,” “A centaur is not”) or as something in particular (e.g. “I am a man,” “I am not a monkey”). Neither Mill, however, nor any of the later logicians whose theories we have quoted, has been able quite to detach judgment from conception; they all suppose that an idea, or ideas, is a condition of all judgment. But judgment starts from sensation (Empfindung) and feeling (Gefühl), and not from idea (Vorstellung). When I feel pleased or pained, or when I use my senses to perceive a pressure, a temperature, a flavour, an odour, a colour, a sound, or when I am conscious of feeling and perceiving, I cannot resist the belief that something sensible is present; and this belief that something exists is already a judgment, a judgment of existence, and, so far as it is limited to sense without inference, a true judgment. It is a matter of words whether or not we should call this sensory belief a judgment; but it is no matter of choice to the logician, who regards all the constituents of inference as judgments; for the fundamental constituents are sensory beliefs, which are therefore judgments in the logical sense. Sense is the evidence of inference; directly of analogical and inductive, directly or indirectly of deductive, inference; and therefore, if logic refuses to include sensory beliefs among judgments, it will omit the fundamental constituents of inference, inference will no longer consist of judgments but of sensory beliefs plus judgments, and the second part of logic, the logic of judgment, the purpose of which is to investigate the constituents of inference, will be like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark. If, on the other hand, all the constituents of inference are judgments, there are judgments of sense; and the evidence of the senses means that a judgment of sense is true, while a judgment of inference is true so far as it is directly or indirectly concluded from judgments of sense. Now a sensory judgment, e.g. that a sensible pressure is existing, is explained by none of the foregoing theories, because it requires nothing but sensation and belief. It requires no will, but is usually involuntary, for the stimulus forces one’s attention, which is not always voluntary; not all judgment then requires will, as Wundt supposes. It requires no reference to reality beyond the sensible pressure, because it is merely a belief that this exists without inference of the external stimulus or any inference at all: not all judgment then requires the reference of subjective to objective supposed by Ueberweg, or the consciousness of logical necessity supposed by Sigwart. It requires in addition to the belief that something exists, no consideration as to whether the belief itself be true, because a man who feels pressure believes in the thing without further question about the belief: not all judgment then requires a decision of validity, as Bergmann supposes. It requires nothing beyond the sensation and belief in the given existence of the given pressure: not all judgment then requires categories of understanding, or notions of identity, difference and causality, or even of existence, such as Schuppe supposes. It requires no comparison in order to express it in words, for a judgment need not be expressed, and a sensory judgment of pressure is an irresistible belief that a real pressure exists, without waiting for words, or for a comparison which is wanted not to make a sensation a judgment, but to turn a judgment into language: not all judgment then requires comparison with a view to its expression, as supposed by Hobhouse. Lastly, all the authors of the above-quoted theories err in supposing that all judgment requires conception; for even Mill thinks a combination of ideas necessary, and Brentano, who comes still nearer to the nature of sensory judgment when he says, “Every perception counts for a judgment,” yet thinks that an idea is necessary at the same time in order to understand the thing judged. In reality, the sensation and the belief are sufficient; when I feel a sensible pressure, I cannot help believing in its reality, and therefore judging that it is real, without any tertium quid—an idea of pressure, or of existence or of pressure existing—intervening between the sensation and the belief. Only after sensation has ceased does an idea, or representation of what is not presented, become necessary as a substitute for a sensation and as a condition not of the first judgment that there is, but of a second judgment that there was, something sensible. Otherwise there would be no judgment of sensible fact, for the first sensation would not give it, and the idea following the sensation would be still farther off. The sensory judgment then, which is nothing but a belief that at the moment of sense something sensible exists, is a proof that not all judgment requires conception, or synthesis or analysis of ideas, or decision about the content, or about the validity, of ideas, or reference of an ideal content to reality, as commonly, though variously, supposed in the logic of our day.
Not, however, that all judgment is sensory: after the first judgments of sense follow judgments of memory, and memory requires ideas. Yet memory is not mere conception, as Aristotle, and Mill after him, have perceived. To remember, we must have a present idea; but we must also have a belief that the thing, of which the idea is a representation, was (or was not) determined; and this belief is the memorial judgment. Originally such judgments arise from sensory judgments followed by ideas, and are judgments of memory after sense that something sensible existed, e.g. pressure existed: afterwards come judgments of memory after inference, e.g. Caesar was murdered. Finally, most judgments are inferential. These are conclusions which primarily are inferred from sensory and memorial judgments; and so far as inference starts from sense of something sensible in the present, and from memory after sense of something sensible in the past, and concludes similar things, inferential judgments are indirect beliefs in being and in existence beyond ideas. When from the sensible pressures between the parts of my mouth, which I feel and remember and judge that they exist and have existed, I infer another similar pressure (e.g. of the food which presses and is pressed by my mouth in eating), the inferential judgment with which I conclude is a belief that the latter exists as well as the former (e.g. the pressure of food without as well as the sensible pressures within). Inference, no doubt, is closely involved with conception. So far as it depends on memory, an inferential judgment presupposes memorial ideas in its data; and so far as it infers universal classes and laws, it produces general ideas. But even so the part played by conception is quite subordinate to that of belief. In the first place, the remembered datum, from which an inference of pressure starts, is not the conceived idea, but the belief that the sensible pressure existed. Secondly, the conclusion in which it ends is not the general idea of a class, but the belief that a class, represented by a general idea, exists, and is (or is not) otherwise determined (e.g. that things pressing and pressed exist and move). Two things are certain about inferential judgment: one, that when inference is based on sense and memory, inferential judgment starts from a combination of sensory and memorial judgment, both of which are beliefs that things exist; the other, that in consequence inferential judgment is a belief that similar things exist. There are thus three primary judgments: judgments of sense, of memory after sense, and of inference from sense. All these are beliefs in being and existence, and this existential belief is first in sense, and afterwards transferred to memory and inference. Moreover, it is transferred in the same irresistible way: frequently we cannot help either feeling pressure, or remembering it, or inferring it; and as there are involuntary sensation and attention, so there are involuntary memory and inference. Again, in a primary judgment existence need not be expressed; but if expressed, it may be expressed either by the predicate, e.g. “I exist,” or by the subject, e.g. “I who exist think.” There are indeed differences between primary judgments, in that the sensory is a belief in present, the memorial in past, and the inferential in present, past and future existence. But these differences in detail do not alter the main point that all these are beliefs in the existing, in the real as opposed to the ideal, in actual things which are not ideas. In short, a primary judgment is a belief in something existing apart from our idea of it; and not because we have an idea of it, or by comparing an idea with, or referring an idea to, reality; but because we have a sensation of it, or a memory of it or an inference of it. Sensation, not conception, is the origin of judgment.
2. Different Significations of Being in different Kinds of Judgment.—As Aristotle remarked both in the De Interpretatione and in the Sophistici Elenchi, “not-being is thinkable” does not mean “not-being exists.” In the latter treatise he added that it is a fallacia a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter to argue from the former to the latter; “for,” as he says, “it is not the same thing to be something and to exist absolutely.” Without realizing their debt to tradition, Herbart, Mill and recently Sigwart, have repeated Aristotle’s separation of the copula from the verb of existence, as if it were a modern discovery that “is” is not the same as “exists.” It may be added that they do not quite realize what the copula exactly signifies: it does not signify existence, but it does signify a fact, namely, that something is (or is not) determined, either absolutely in a categorical judgment, or conditionally in a conditional judgment. Now we have seen that all primary judgments signify more than this fact; they are also beliefs in the existence of the thing signified by the subject. But, in the first place, primary judgments signify this existence never by the copula, but sometimes by the predicate, and sometimes by the subject; and, secondly, it does not follow that all judgments whatever signify existence. Besides inference of existence there is inference of non-existence, of things inconsistent with the objects of primary judgments. Hence secondary judgments, which no longer contain a belief that the thing exists, e.g. the judgment, “not-being is thinkable,” cited by Aristotle; the judgment, “A square circle is impossible,” cited by Herbart; the judgment, “A centaur is a fiction of the poets,” cited by Mill. These secondary judgments of non-existence are partly like and partly unlike primary judgments of existence. They resemble them in that they are beliefs in being signified by the copula. They are beliefs in things of a sort; for, after all, ideas and names are things; their objects, even though non-existent, are at all events things conceivable or nameable; and therefore we are able to make judgments that things, non-existent but conceivable or nameable, are (or are not) determined in a particular manner. Thus the judgment about a centaur is the belief, “A conceivable centaur is a fiction of the poets,” and the judgment about a square circle is the belief, “A so-called square circle is an impossibility.” But, though beliefs that things of some sort are (or are not) determined, these secondary judgments fall short of primary judgments of existence. Whereas in a primary judgment there is a further belief, signified by subject or predicate, that the thing is an existing thing in the sense of being a real thing (e.g. a man), different from the idea of it as well as from the name for it; in a secondary judgment there is no further belief that the thing has any existence beyond the idea (e.g. a centaur), or even beyond the name (e.g. a square circle): though the idea or name exists, there is no belief that anything represented by idea or name exists. Starting, then, from this fundamental distinction between judgments of existence and judgments of non-existence, we may hope to steer our way between two extreme views which emanate from two important thinkers, each of whom has produced a flourishing school of psychological logic.
On the one hand, early in the 19th century Herbart started the view that a categorical judgment is never a judgment of existence, but always hypothetical; on the other hand, in the latter part of the century Brentano started the view that all categorical judgments are existential. The truth lies between these contraries. The view of Herbart and his school is contradicted by our primary judgments of and from sense, in which we cannot help believing existence; and it gives an inadequate account even of our secondary judgments in which we no longer indeed believe existence, but do frequently believe that a non-existent thing is (or is not) somehow determined unconditionally. It is true, as Herbart says, that the judgment, “A square circle is an impossibility,” does not contain the belief, “A square circle is existent”; but when he goes on to argue that it means, “If a square circle is thought, the conception of impossibility must be added in thought,” he falls into a non-sequitur. To be categorical, a judgment does not require a belief in existence, but only that something, existent or not, is (or is not) determined; and there are two quite different attitudes of mind even to a non-existent thing, such as a square circle, namely, unconditional and conditional belief. The judgment, “A non-existent but so-called square circle is an impossibility,” is an unconditional, or categorical judgment of non-existence, quite different from any hypothetical judgment, which depends on the conditions “if it is thought,” or “if it exists,” or any other “if.” On the other hand, the view of Brentano and his school is contradicted by these very categorical judgments of non-existence; and while it applies only to categorical judgments of existence, it does so inadequately. To begin with the latter objection, Brentano proposed to change the four Aristotelian forms of judgment, A, E, I, O, into the following existential forms:—
A. “There is not an immortal man.”
E. “There is not a live stone.”
I. “There is a sick man.”
O. “There is an unlearned man.”
This reconstruction, which merges subject and predicate in one expression, in order to combine it with the verb of existence, is repeated in similar proposals of recent English logicians. Venn, in his Symbolic Logic, proposes the four forms, xȳ = 0, xy = 0, xy > 0, xȳ > 0 (where ȳ means “not-y”), but only as alternative to the ordinary forms. Bradley says that “‘S-P is real’ attributes S-P, directly or indirectly, to the ultimate reality,” and agrees with Brentano that “’is’ never stands for anything but ‘exists’”; while Bosanquet, who follows Bradley, goes so far as to define a categorical judgment as “that which affirms the existence of its subject, or, in other words, asserts a fact.” Now it is true that our primary judgments do contain a belief in existence; but they do not all contain it in the same way, but are beliefs sometimes that something is determined as existing, and sometimes that something existing is particularly determined. Brentano’s forms do not express such a judgment of existence, as “All existing men are mortal”: nor does Bradley’s form, “Reality includes S-P.” Metaphysically, all realities are parts of one ultimate reality; but logically, even philosophers think more often only of finite realities, existing men, dogs, horses, &c.; and children know that their parents exist long before they apprehend ultimate reality. The normal form, then, of a judgment of existence is either “S is a real P,” or “A real S is P.” Hence the reconstruction of all categorical judgments by merging subject and predicate, either on Brentano’s or on Bradley’s plan, is a misrepresentation even of normal categorical judgments of existence. Secondly, it is much more a misrepresentation of categorical judgments of non-existence. No existential form suits a judgment such as “A centaur is a fiction,” when we do not believe that there is a centaur, or that reality includes a centaur. As Mill pointed out, it cannot be implied that a centaur exists, since the very thing asserted is that the thing has no real existence. In a correspondence with Mill, Brentano rejoined that the centaur exists in imagination; Bradley says, “inside our heads.” According to one, then, the judgment becomes “There is an imaginary centaur”; according to the other “Reality includes an imaginary centaur.” The rejoinder, however, though partly true, is not to the point. The idea of the centaur does exist in our imagination, and inside our heads, and the name of it in our mouths. But the point is that the centaur conceived and named does not exist beyond the idea of it and the name for it; it is not, like a man, a real thing which is neither the idea of it nor the name for it. No amount of subtlety will remove the difference between a categorical judgment of existence, e.g. “An existing man is mortal,” and a categorical judgment of non-existence, e.g. “A conceivable centaur is a fiction,” because in the former we believe and mean that the thing exists beyond the idea, and in the latter we do not. If, contrary to usage, we choose to call the latter a judgment of existence, there is no use in quarrelling about words; but we must insist that new terms must in that case be invented to express so fundamental a difference as that between judgments about real men and judgments about ideal centaurs. So long, however, as we use words in the natural sense, and call the former judgments of existence, and the latter judgments of non-existence, then “is” will not be, as Bradley supposes, the same as “exists,” for we use “is” in both judgments, but “exists” only in the first kind. Bosanquet’s definition of a categorical judgment contains a similar confusion. To assert a fact and to affirm the existence of a subject are not, as he makes out, the same thing: a judgment often asserts a fact and denies existence in the same breath, e.g. “Jupiter is non-existent.” Here, as usual in logic, tradition is better than innovation. All categorical judgment is an unconditional belief in the fact, signified by the copula, that a thing of some sort is (or is not) determined; but some categorical judgments are also beliefs that the thing is an existing thing, signified either by the subject or by the predicate, while others are not beliefs that the thing exists at all, but are only beliefs in something conceivable, or nameable, or in something or other, without particularizing what. Judgment then always signifies being, but not always existence. 3. Particular and Universal Judgments.—Aristotle, by distinguishing affirmative and negative, particular and universal, made the fourfold classification of judgments, A, E, I and O, the foundation both of opposition and of inference. With regard to inference, he remarked that a universal judgment means by “all,” not every individual we know, but every individual absolutely, so that, when it becomes a major premise, we know therein every individual universally, not individually, and often do not know a given individual individually until we add a minor premise in a syllogism. Whereas, then, a particular judgment is a belief that some, a universal judgment is a belief that all, the individuals of a kind or total of similar individuals, are similarly determined, whether they are known or unknown individuals. Now, as we have already seen, what is signified by the subject may be existing or not, and in either case a judgment remains categorical so long as it is a belief without conditions. Thus, “Some existing men are poets,” “All existing men are mortal,” “Some conceivable centaurs are human in their forequarters,” “All conceivable centaurs are equine in their hindquarters,” are all categorical judgments, while the two first are also categorical judgments of existence. Nevertheless these obvious applications of Aristotelian traditions have been recently challenged, especially by Sigwart, who holds in his Logic (secs. 27, 36) that, while a particular is a categorical judgment of existence, a universal is hypothetical, on the ground that it does not refer to a definite number of individuals, or to individuals at all, but rather to general ideas, and that the appropriate form of “all M is P” is “if anything is M it is P.” This view, which has influenced not only German but also English logicians, such as Venn, Bradley and Bosanquet, destroys the fabric of inference, and reduces scientific laws to mere hypotheses. In reality, however, particular and universal judgments are too closely connected to have such different imports. In opposition, a categorical particular is the contradictory of a universal, which is also categorical, not hypothetical, e.g., “not all M is P” is the contradictory of “all M is P,” not of “if anything is M it is P.” In inference, a particular is an example of a universal which in its turn may become a particular example of a higher universal. For instance, in the history of mechanics it was first inferred from some that all terrestrial bodies gravitate, and then from these as some that all ponderable bodies, terrestrial and celestial, gravitate. How absurd to suppose that here we pass from a particular categorical to a universal hypothetical, and then treat this very conclusion as a particular categorical to pass to a higher universal hypothetical! Sigwart, indeed, is deceived both about particulars and universals. On the one hand, some particulars are not judgments of existence, e.g. “some imaginary deities are goddesses”; on the other hand, some universals are not judgments of non-existence, e.g. “every existing man is mortal.” Neither kind is always a judgment of existence, but each is sometimes the one and sometimes the other. In no case is a universal hypothetical, unless we think it under a condition; for in a universal judgment about the non-existing, e.g. about all conceivable centaurs, we do not think, “If anything is a centaur,” because we do not believe that there are any; and in a universal judgment about the existent, e.g. about all existing men, we do not think, “If anything is a man,” because we believe that there is a whole class of men existing at different times and places. The cause of Sigwart’s error is his misconception of “all.” So far as he follows Aristotle in saying that “all” does not mean a definite number of individuals he is right; but when he says that we mean no individuals at all he deserts Aristotle and goes wrong. By “all” we mean every individual whatever of a kind; and when from the experience of sense and memory we start with particular judgments of existence, and infer universal judgments of existence and scientific laws, we further mean those existing individuals which we have experienced, and every individual whatever of the kind which exists. We mean neither a definite number of individuals, nor yet an infinite number, but an incalculable number, whether experienced or inferred to exist. We do not mean existing here and now, nor yet out of time and place, but at any time and place (semper et ubique)—past, present and future being treated as simply existing, by what logicians used to call suppositio naturalis. We mean then by “all existing” every similar individual whatever, whenever, and wherever existing. Hence Sigwart is right in saying that “All bodies are extended” means “Whatever is a body is extended,” but wrong in identifying this form with “If anything is a body it is extended.” “Whatever” is not “if anything.” For the same reason it is erroneous to confuse “all existing” with a general idea. Nor does the use of abstract ideas and terms make any difference. When Bosanquet says that in “Heat is a mode of motion” there is no reference to individual objects, but “a pure hypothetical form which absolutely neglects the existence of objects,” he falls far short of expressing the nature of this scientific judgment, for in his Theory of Heat Clerk Maxwell describes it as “believing heat as it exists in a hot body to be in the form of kinetic energy.” As Bacon would say, it is a belief that all individual bodies qua hot are individually but similarly moving in their particles. When, again, Bradley and Bosanquet speak of the universal as if it always meant one ideal content referred to reality, they forget that in universal judgments of existence, such as “All men existing are mortal,” we believe that every individually existing man dies his own death individually, though similarly to other men; and that we are thinking neither of ideas nor of reality; but of all existent individual men being individually but similarly determined. A universal is indeed one whole; but it is one whole of many similars, which are not the same with one another. This is indeed the very essence of distribution, that a universal is predicable, not singly or collectively, but severally and similarly of each and every individual of a kind, or total of similar individuals. So also the essence of a universal judgment is that every individual of the kind is severally but similarly determined. Finally, a universal judgment is often existential; but whether it is so or not it remains categorical, so long as it introduces no hypothetical antecedent about the existence of the thing signified by the subject. It is true that even in universal judgments of existence there is often a hypothetical element; for example, “All men are mortal” contains a doubt whether every man whatever, whenever and wherever existing, must die. But this is only a doubt whether all the things signified by the subject are similarly determined as signified by the predicate, and not a doubt whether there are such things at all. Hence the hypothetical element is not a hypothetical antecedent “If anything is a man,” but an uncertain conclusion that “All existing men are mortal.” In other words, a categorical universal is often problematic, but a problematic is not the same as a hypothetical judgment.
4. The Judgment and the Proposition.—Judgment in general is the mental act of believing that something is (or is not) determined. A proposition is the consequent verbal expression of such a belief, and consists in asserting that the thing as signified by the subject is (or is not) determined as signified by the predicate. But the expression is not necessary. Sensation irresistibly produces a judgment of existence without needing language. Children think long before they speak; and indeed, as mere vocal sounds are not speech, and as the apprehension that a word signifies a thing is a judgment, judgment is originally not an effect, but a cause of significant language. At any rate, even when we have learnt to speak, we do not express all we think, as we may see not only from the fewness of words known to a child, but also from our own adult consciousness. The principle of thought is to judge enough to conclude. The principle of language is to speak only so far as to understand and be understood. Hence speech is only a curtailed expression of thought. Sometimes we express a whole judgment by one word, e.g. “Fire!” or by a phrase, e.g. “What a fire!” and only usually by a proposition. But even the normal proposition in the syllogistic form tertii adjacentis, with subject, predicate and copula, is seldom a complete expression of the judgment. The consequence is that the proposition, being different from a judgment arising after a judgment, and remaining an imperfect copy of judgment, is only a superficial evidence of its real nature. Fortunately, we have more profound evidences, and at least three evidences in all: the linguistic expression of belief in the proposition; the consciousness of what we mentally believe; and the analysis of reasoning, which shows what we must believe, and have believed, as data for inference. In these ways we find that a judgment is both different from, and more than, a proposition. But recent logicians, although they perceive the difference, nevertheless tend to make the proposition the measure of the judgment. This makes them omit sensory judgments, and count only those which require ideas, and even general ideas expressed in general terms. Sigwart, for example, gives as instances of our most elementary judgments, “This is Socrates,” “This is snow”—beliefs in things existing beyond ourselves which require considerable inferences from many previous judgments of sense and memory. Worse still, logicians seem unable to keep the judgment apart from the proposition. Herbart says that the judgment “A is B” does not contain the usually added thought that A is, because there is no statement of A’s existence; as if the statement mattered to the thought. So Sigwart, in order to reduce universals to hypotheticals, while admitting that existence is usually thought, argues that it is not stated in the universal judgment; so also Bosanquet. But in the judgment the point is not what we state, but what we think; and so long as the existence of A is added in thought, the judgment in question must contain the thought that A exists as well as that A is B, and therefore is a judgment that something is determined both as existing and in a particular manner. The statement only affects the proposition; and whenever we believe the existence of the thing, the belief in existence is part of the judgment thought, whether it is part of the proposition stated or not.
Here Sir William Hamilton did a real service to logic in pointing out that “Logic postulates to be allowed to state explicitly in language all that is implicitly contained in the thought.” Not that men should or can carry this logical postulate out in ordinary life; but it is necessary in the logical analysis of judgments, and yet logicians neglect it. This is why they confuse the categorical and the universal with the hypothetical. Taking the carelessly expressed propositions of ordinary life, they do not perceive that similar judgments are often differently expressed, e.g. “I, being a man, am mortal,” and “If I am a man, I am mortal”; and conversely, that different judgments are often similarly expressed. In ordinary life we may say, “All men are mortal,” “All centaurs are figments,” “All square circles are impossibilities,” “All candidates arriving five minutes late are fined” (the last proposition being an example of the identification of categorical with hypothetical in Keynes’s Formal Logic). But of these universal propositions the first imperfectly expresses a categorical belief in existing things, the second in thinkable things, and the third in nameable things, while the fourth is a slipshod categorical expression of the hypothetical belief, “If any candidates arrive late they are fined.” The four judgments are different, and therefore logically the propositions fully expressing them are also different. The judgment, then, is the measure of the proposition, not the proposition the measure of the judgment. On the other hand, we may go too far in the opposite direction, as Hamilton did in proposing the universal quantification of the predicate. If the quantity of the predicate were always thought, it ought logically to be always stated. But we only sometimes think it. Usually we leave the predicate indefinite, because, as long as the thing in question is (or is not) determined, it does not matter about other things, and it is vain for us to try to think all things at once. It is remarkable that in Barbara, and therefore in many scientific deductions, to think the quantity of the predicate is not to the point either in the premises or in the conclusion; so that to quantify the propositions, as Hamilton proposes, would be to express more than a rational man thinks and judges. In judgments, and therefore in propositions, indefinite predicates are the rule, quantified predicates the exception. Consequently, A E I O are the normal propositions with indefinite predicates; whereas propositions with quantified predicates are only occasional forms, which we should use whenever we require to think the quantity of the predicate, e.g. (1) in conversion, when we must think that all men are some animals, in order to judge that some animals are men; (2) in syllogisms of the 3rd figure, when the predicate of the minor premise must be particularly quantified in thought in order to become the particularly quantified subject of the conclusion; (3) in identical propositions including definitions, where we must think both that 1 + 1 are 2 and 2 are 1 + 1. But the normal judgment, and therefore the normal proposition, do not require the quantity of the predicate. It follows also that the normal judgment is not an equation. The symbol of equality (=) is not the same as the copula (is); it means “is equal to,” where “equal to” is part of the predicate, leaving “is” as the copula. Now, in all judgment we think “is,” but in few judgments predicate “equal to.” In quantitative judgments we may think x = y, or, as Boole proposes, x = vy = 00y or, as Jevons proposes, x = xy, or, as Venn proposes, x which is not y = 0; and equational symbolic logic is useful whenever we think in this quantitative way. But it is a byway of thought. In most judgments all we believe is that x is (or is not) y, that a thing is (or is not) determined, and that the thing signified by the subject is a thing signified by the predicate, but not that it is the only thing, or equal to everything signified by the predicate. The symbolic logic, which confuses “is” with “is equal to,” having introduced a particular kind of predicate into the copula, falls into the mistake of reducing all predication to the one category of the quantitative; whereas it is more often in the substantial, e.g. “I am a man,” not “I am equal to a man,” or in the qualitative, e.g. “I am white,” not “I am equal to white,” or in the relative, e.g. “I am born in sin,” not “I am equal to born in sin.” Predication, as Aristotle saw, is as various as the categories of being. Finally, the great difficulty of the logic of judgment is to find the mental act behind the linguistic expression, to ascribe to it exactly what is thought, neither more nor less, and to apply the judgment thought to the logical proposition, without expecting to find it in ordinary propositions. Beneath Hamilton’s postulate there is a deeper principle of logic—A rational being thinks only to the point, and speaks only to understand and be understood.
Inference
The nature and analysis of inference have been so fully treated in the Introduction that here we may content ourselves with some points of detail.
1. False Views of Syllogism arising from False Views of Judgment.—The false views of judgment, which we have been examining, have led to false views of inference. On the one hand, having reduced categorical judgments to an existential form, Brentano proposes to reform the syllogism, with the results that it must contain four terms, of which two are opposed and two appear twice; that, when it is negative, both premises are negative; and that, when it is affirmative, one premise, at least, is negative. In order to infer the universal affirmative that every professor is mortal because he is a man, Brentano’s existential syllogism would run as follows:—
| There is not a not-mortal man. |
On the other hand, if on the plan of Sigwart categorical universals were reducible to hypotheticals, the same inference would be a pure hypothetical syllogism, thus:—
| If anything is a man it is mortal. |
But both these unnatural forms, which are certainly not analyses of any conscious process of categorical reasoning, break down at once, because they cannot explain those moods in the third figure, e.g. Darapti, which reason from universal premises to a particular conclusion. Thus, in order to infer that some wise men are good from the example of professors, Brentano’s syllogism would be the following non-sequitur:—
| There is not a not-good professor. |
So Sigwart’s syllogism would be the following non-sequitur:—
| If anything is a professor, it is good. |
But as by the admission of both logicians these reconstructions of Darapti are illogical, it follows that their respective reductions of categorical universals to existentials and hypotheticals are false, because they do not explain an actual inference. Sigwart does not indeed shrink from this and greater absurdities; he reduces the first figure to the modus ponens and the second to the modus tollens of the hypothetical syllogism, and then, finding no place for the third figure, denies that it can infer necessity; whereas it really infers the necessary consequence of particular conclusions. But the crowning absurdity is that, if all universals were hypothetical, Barbara in the first figure would become a purely hypothetical syllogism—a consequence which seems innocent enough until we remember that all universal affirmative conclusions in all sciences would with their premises dissolve into mere hypothesis. No logic can be sound which leads to the following analysis:—
| If anything is a body it is extended. |
Sigwart, indeed, has missed the essential difference between the categorical and the hypothetical construction of syllogisms. In a categorical syllogism of the first figure, the major premise, “Every M whatever is P,” is a universal, which we believe on account of previous evidence without any condition about the thing signified by the subject M, which we simply believe sometimes to be existent (e.g. “Every man existent”), and sometimes not (e.g., “Every centaur conceivable”); and the minor premise, “S is M,” establishes no part of the major, but adds the evidence of a particular not thought of in the major at all. But in a hypothetical syllogism of the ordinary mixed type, the first or hypothetical premise is a conditional belief, e.g. “If anything is M it is P,” containing a hypothetical antecedent, “If anything is M,” which is sometimes a hypothesis of existence (e.g. “If anything is an angel”), and sometimes a hypothesis of fact (e.g. “If an existing man is wise”); and the second premise or assumption, “Something is M,” establishes part of the first, namely, the hypothetical antecedent, whether as regards existence (e.g. “Something is an angel”), or as regards fact (e.g. “This existing man is wise”). These very different relations of premises are obliterated by Sigwart’s false reduction of categorical universals to hypotheticals. But even Sigwart’s errors are outdone by Lotze, who not only reduces “Every M is P” so “If S is M, S is P,” but proceeds to reduce this hypothetical to the disjunctive, “If S is M, S is P1 or P2 or P3,” and finds fault with the Aristotelian syllogism because it contents itself with inferring “S is P” without showing what P. Now there are occasions when we want to reason in this disjunctive manner, to consider whether S is P1 or P2 or P3, and to conclude that “S is a particular P”; but ordinarily all we want to know is that “S is P”; e.g. in arithmetic, that 2 + 2 are 4, not any particular 4, and in life that all our contemporaries must die, without enumerating all their particular sorts of deaths. Lotze’s mistake is the same as that of Hamilton about the quantification of the predicate, and that of those symbolists who held that reasoning ought always to exhaust all alternatives by equations. It is the mistake of exaggerating exceptional into normal forms of thought, and ignoring the principle that a rational being thinks only to the point.
2. Quasi-syllogisms.—Besides reconstructions of the syllogistic fabric, we find in recent logic attempts to extend the figures of the syllogism beyond the syllogistic rules. An old error that we may have a valid syllogism from merely negative premises (ex omnibus negativis), long ago answered by Alexander and Boethius, is now revived by Lotze, Jevons and Bradley, who do not perceive that the supposed second negative is really an affirmative containing a “not” which can only be carried through the syllogism by separating it from the copula and attaching it to one of the extremes, thus:—
| The just are not unhappy (negative). |
Here the minor being the infinite term “not-recognized” in the conclusion, must be the same term also in the minor premise. Schuppe, however, who is a fertile creator of quasi-syllogisms, has managed to invent some examples from two negative premises of a different kind:—
| (1) | (2) | (3) |
| No M is P. | No M is P. | No P is M. |
| S is not P. | S is not M. | S is not M. |
| ∴Neither S nor M is P. | ∴S may be P. | ∴S may be P. |
But (1) concludes with a mere repetition, (2) and (3) with a contingent “may be,” which, as Aristotle says, also “may not be,” and therefore nihil certo colligitur. The same answer applies to Schuppe’s supposed syllogisms from two particular premises:—
| (1) | (2) |
| Some M is P. | Some M is P. |
| Some S is M. | Some M is S. |
| ∴Some S may be P. | ∴Some S may be P. |
The only difference between these and the previous examples (2) and (3) is that, while those break the rule against two negative premises, these break that against undistributed middle. Equally fallacious are two other attempts of Schuppe to produce syllogisms from invalid moods:—
| (1) 1st Fig. | (2) 2nd Fig. |
| All M is P. | P is M. |
| No S is M. | S is M. |
| ∴S may be P. | ∴S is partially identical with P. |
In the first the fallacy is the indifferent contingency of the conclusion caused by the non-sequitur from a negative premise to an affirmative conclusion; while the second is either a mere repetition of the premises if the conclusion means “S is like P in being M,” or, if it means “S is P,” a non-sequitur on account of the undistributed middle. It must not be thought that this trifling with logical rules has no effect. The last supposed syllogism, namely, that having two affirmative premises and entailing an undistributed middle in the second figure, is accepted by Wundt under the title “Inference by Comparison” (Vergleichungsschluss), and is supposed by him to be useful for abstraction and subsidiary to induction, and by Bosanquet to be useful for analogy. Wundt, for example, proposes the following premises:—
| Gold is a shining, fusible, ductile, simple body. |
| Metals are shining, fusible, ductile, simple bodies. |
But to say from these premises, “Gold and metal are similar in what is signified by the middle term,” is a mere repetition of the premises; to say, further, that “Gold may be a metal” is a non-sequitur, because, the middle being undistributed, the logical conclusion is the contingent “Gold may or may not be a metal,” which leaves the question quite open, and therefore there is no syllogism. Wundt, who is again followed by Bosanquet, also supposes another syllogism in the third figure, under the title of “Inference by Connexion” (Verbindungsschluss), to be useful for induction. He proposes, for example, the following premises:—
| Gold, silver, copper, lead, are fusible. |
| Gold, silver, copper, lead, are metals. |
Here there is no syllogistic fallacy in the premises; but the question is what syllogistic conclusion can be drawn, and there is only one which follows without an illicit process of the minor, namely, “Some metals are fusible.” The moment we stir a step further with Wundt in the direction of a more general conclusion (ein allgemeinerer Satz), we cannot infer from the premises the conclusion desired by Wundt, “Metals and fusible are connected”; nor can we infer “All metals are fusible,” nor “Metals are fusible,” nor “Metals may be fusible,” nor “All metals may be fusible,” nor any assertory conclusion, determinate or indeterminate, but the indifferent contingent, “All metals may or may not be fusible,” which leaves the question undecided, so that there is no syllogism. We do not mean that in Wundt’s supposed “inferences of relation by comparison and connexion” the premises are of no further use; but those of the first kind are of no syllogistic use in the second figure, and those of the second kind of no syllogistic use beyond particular conclusions in the third figure. What they really are in the inferences proposed by Wundt is not premises for syllogism, but data for induction parading as syllogism. We must pass the same sentence on Lotze’s attempt to extend the second figure of the syllogism for inductive purposes, thus:—
| S is M. |
| Q is M. |
| R is M. |
| ∴Every Σ, which is common to S, Q, R, is M. |
We could not have a more flagrant abuse of the rule Ne esto plus minusque in conclusione quam in praemissis. As we see from Lotze’s own defence, the conclusion cannot be drawn without another premise or premises to the effect that “S, Q, R, are Σ, and Σ is the one real subject of M.” But how is all this to be got into the second figure? Again, Wundt and B. Erdmann propose new moods of syllogism with convertible premises, containing definitions and equations. Wundt’s Logic has the following forms:—
| (1) 1st Fig. | (2) 2nd Fig. | (3) 3rd Fig. |
| Only M is P. | x = y. | y = x. |
| No S is M. | z = y. | y = z. |
| ∴No S is P. | ∴x = z. | ∴x = z. |
Now, there is no doubt that, especially in mathematical equations, universal conclusions are obtainable from convertible premises expressed in these ways. But the question is how the premises must be thought, and they must be thought in the converse way to produce a logical conclusion. Thus, we must think in (1) “All P is M” to avoid illicit process of the major, in (2) “All y is z” to avoid undistributed middle, in (3) “All x is y ” to avoid illicit process of the minor. Indeed, it is the very essence of a convertible judgment to think it in both orders, and especially to think it in the order necessary to an inference from it. Accordingly, however expressed, the syllogisms quoted above are, as thought, ordinary syllogisms, (1) being Camestres in the second figure, (2) and (3) Barbara in the first figure. Aristotle, indeed, was as well aware as German logicians of the force of convertible premises; but he was also aware that they require no special syllogisms, and made it a point that, in a syllogism from a definition, the definition is the middle, and the definitum the major in a convertible major premise of Barbara in the first figure, e.g.:—
| The interposition of an opaque body is (essentially) deprivation of light. |
| The moon suffers the interposition of the opaque earth. |
| ∴The moon suffers deprivation of light. |
It is the same with all the recent attempts to extend the syllogism beyond its rules, which are not liable to exceptions, because they follow from the nature of syllogistic inference from universal to particular. To give the name of syllogism to inferences which infringe the general rules against undistributed middle, illicit process, two negative premises, non-sequitur from negative to affirmative, and the introduction of what is not in the premises into the conclusion, and which consequently infringe the special rules against affirmative conclusions in the second figure, and against universal conclusions in the third figure, is to open the door to fallacy, and at best to confuse the syllogism with other kinds of inference, without enabling us to understand any one kind.
3. Analytic and Synthetic Deduction.—Alexander the Commentator defined synthesis as a progress from principles to consequences, analysis as a regress from consequences to principles; and Latin logicians preserved the same distinction between the progressus a principiis ad principiata, and the regressus a principiatis ad principia. No distinction is more vital in the logic of inference in general and of scientific inference in particular; and yet none has been so little understood, because, though analysis is the more usual order of discovery, synthesis is that of instruction, and therefore, by becoming more familiar, tends to replace and obscure the previous analysis. The distinction, however, did not escape Aristotle, who saw that a progressive syllogism can be reversed thus:—
| 1. Progression. | 2. Regression. | |
| (1) | (2) | |
| All M is P. | All P is M. | All S is P. |
| All S is M. | All S is P. | All M is S. |
| ∴All S is P. | ∴All S is M. | ∴All M is P. |
Proceeding from one order to the other, by converting one of the premises, and substituting the conclusion as premise for the other premise, so as to deduce the latter as conclusion, is what he calls circular inference; and he remarked that the process is fallacious unless it contains propositions which are convertible, as in mathematical equations. Further, he perceived that the difference between the progressive and regressive orders extends from mathematics to physics, and that there are two kinds of syllogism: one progressing a priori from real ground to consequent fact (ὁ τοῦ διότι συλλογισμός), and the other regressing a posteriori from consequent fact to real ground (ὁ τοῦ ὄτι συλλογισμός). For example, as he says, the sphericity of the moon is the real ground of the fact of its light waxing; but we can deduce either from the other, as follows:—
| 1. Progression. | 2. Regression. |
| What is spherical waxes. | What waxes is spherical. |
| The moon is spherical. | The moon waxes. |
| ∴The moon waxes. | ∴The moon is spherical. |
These two kinds of syllogism are synthesis and analysis in the ancient sense. Deduction is analysis when it is regressive from consequence to real ground, as when we start from the proposition that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles and deduce analytically that therefore (1) they are equal to equal angles made by a straight line standing on another straight line, and (2) such equal angles are two right angles. Deduction is synthesis when it is progressive from real ground to consequence, as when we start from these two results of analysis as principles and deduce synthetically the proposition that therefore the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, in the order familiar to the student of Euclid. But the full value of the ancient theory of these processes cannot be appreciated until we recognize that as Aristotle planned them Newton used them. Much of the Principia consists of synthetical deductions from definitions and axioms. But the discovery of the centripetal force of the planets to the sun is an analytic deduction from the facts of their motion discovered by Kepler to their real ground, and is so stated by Newton in the first regressive order of Aristotle—P-M, S-P, S-M. Newton did indeed first show synthetically what kind of motions by mechanical laws have their ground in a centripetal force varying inversely as the square of the distance (all P is M); but his next step was, not to deduce synthetically the planetary motions, but to make a new start from the planetary motions as facts established by Kepler’s laws and as examples of the kind of motions in question (all S is P); and then, by combining these two premises, one mechanical and the other astronomical, he analytically deduced that these facts of planetary motion have their ground in a centripetal force varying inversely as the squares of the distances of the planets from the sun (all S is M). (See Principia I. prop. 2; 4 coroll. 6; III. Phaenomena, 4-5; prop. 2.) What Newton did, in short, was to prove by analysis that the planets, revolving by Kepler’s astronomical laws round the sun, have motions such as by mechanical laws are consequences of a centripetal force to the sun. This done, as the major is convertible, the analytic order—P-M, S-P, S-M—was easily inverted into the synthetic order—M-P, S-M, S-P; and in this progressive order the deduction as now taught begins with the centripetal force of the sun as real ground, and deduces the facts of planetary motion as consequences. Thereupon the Newtonian analysis which preceded this synthesis, became forgotten; until at last Mill in his Logic, neglecting the Principia, had the temerity to distort Newton’s discovery, which was really a pure example of analytic deduction, into a mere hypothetical deduction; as if the author of the saying “Hypotheses non fingo” started from the hypothesis of a centripetal force to the sun, and thence deductively explained the facts of planetary motion, which reciprocally verified the hypothesis. This gross misrepresentation has made hypothesis a kind of logical fashion. Worse still, Jevons proceeded to confuse analytic deduction from consequence to ground with hypothetical deduction from ground to consequence under the common term “inverse deduction.” Wundt attempts, but in vain, to make a compromise between the old and the new. He re-defines analysis in the very opposite way to the ancients; whereas they defined it as a regressive process from consequence to ground, according to Wundt it is a progressive process of taking for granted a proposition and deducing a consequence, which being true verifies the proposition. He then divides it into two species: one categorical, the other hypothetical. By the categorical he means the ancient analysis from a given proposition to more general propositions. By the hypothetical he means the new-fangled analysis from a given proposition to more particular propositions, i.e. from a hypothesis to consequent facts. But his account of the first is imperfect, because in ancient analysis the more general propositions, with which it concludes, are not mere consequences, but the real grounds of the given proposition; while his addition of the second reduces the nature of analysis to the utmost confusion, because hypothetical deduction is progressive from hypothesis to consequent facts whereas analysis is regressive from consequent facts to real ground. There is indeed a sense in which all inference is from ground to consequence, because it is from logical ground (principium cognoscendi) to logical consequence. But in the sense in which deductive analysis is opposed to deductive synthesis, analysis is deduction from real consequence as logical ground (principiatum as principium cognoscendi) to real ground (principium essendi), e.g. from the consequential facts of planetary motion to their real ground, i.e. centripetal force to the sun. Hence Sigwart is undoubtedly right in distinguishing analysis from hypothetical deduction, for which he proposes the name “reduction.” We have only further to add that many scientific discoveries about sound, heat, light, colour and so forth, which it is the fashion to represent as hypotheses to explain facts, are really analytical deductions from the facts to their real grounds in accordance with mechanical laws. Recent logic does scant justice to scientific analysis.
4. Induction.—As induction is the process from particulars to universals, it might have been thought that it would always have been opposed to syllogism, in which one of the rules is against using particular premises to draw universal conclusions. Yet such is the passion for one type that from Aristotle’s time till now constant attempts have been made to reduce induction to syllogism. Aristotle himself invented an inductive syllogism in which the major (P) is to be referred to the middle (M) by means of the minor (S), thus:—
| A, B, C magnets (S) attract iron (P). |
| A, B, C magnets (S) are all magnets whatever (M). |
| ∴All magnets whatever (M) attract iron (P). |
As the second premise is supposed to be convertible, he reduced the inductive to a deductive syllogism as follows:—
| Every S is P. | Every S is P. |
| Every S is M (convertibly). | Every M is S. |
| ∴Every M is P. | ∴Every M is P. |
In the reduced form the inductive syllogism was described by Aldrich as “Syllogismus in Barbara cujus minor (i.e. every M is S) reticetur.” Whately, on the other hand, proposed an inductive syllogism with the major suppressed, that is, instead of the minor premise above, he supposed a major premise, “Whatever belongs to A, B, C magnets belongs to all.” Mill thereupon supposed a still more general premise, an assumption of the uniformity of nature. Since Mill’s time, however, the logic of induction tends to revert towards syllogisms more like that of Aristotle. Jevons supposed induction to be inverse deduction, distinguished from direct deduction as analysis from synthesis, e.g. as division from multiplication; but he really meant that it is a deduction from a hypothesis of the law of a cause to particular effects which, being true, verify the hypothesis. Sigwart declares himself in agreement with Jevons; except that, being aware of the difference between hypothetical deduction and mathematical analysis, and seeing that, whereas analysis (e.g. in division) leads to certain conclusions, hypothetical deduction is not certain of the hypothesis, he arrives at the more definite view that induction is not analysis proper but hypothetical deduction, or “reduction,” as he proposes to call it. Reduction he defines as “the framing of possible premises for given propositions, or the construction of a syllogism when the conclusion and one premise is given.” On this view induction becomes a reduction in the form: all M is P (hypothesis), S is M (given), ∴ S is P (given). The views of Jevons and Sigwart are in agreement in two main points. According to both, induction, instead of inferring from A, B, C magnets the conclusion “Therefore all magnets attract iron,” infers from the hypothesis, “Let every magnet attract iron,” to A, B, C magnets, whose given attraction verifies the hypothesis. According to both, again, the hypothesis of a law with which the process starts contains more than is present in the particular data: according to Jevons, it is the hypothesis of a law of a cause from which induction deduces particular effects; and according to Sigwart, it is a hypothesis of the ground from which the particular data necessarily follow according to universal laws. Lastly, Wundt’s view is an interesting piece of eclecticism, for he supposes that induction begins in the form of Aristotle’s inductive syllogism, S–P, S–M, M–P, and becomes an inductive method in the form of Jevons’s inverse deduction, or hypothetical deduction, or analysis, M–P, S–M, S–P. In detail, he supposes that, while an “inference by comparison,” which he erroneously calls an affirmative syllogism in the second figure, is preliminary to induction, a second “inference by connexion,” which he erroneously calls a syllogism in the third figure with an indeterminate conclusion, is the inductive syllogism itself. This is like Aristotle’s inductive syllogism in the arrangement of terms; but, while on the one hand Aristotle did not, like Wundt, confuse it with the third figure, on the other hand Wundt does not, like Aristotle, suppose it to be practicable to get inductive data so wide as the convertible premise, “All S is M, and all M is S,” which would at once establish the conclusion, “All M is P.” Wundt’s point is that the conclusion of the inductive syllogism is neither so much as all, nor so little as some, but rather the indeterminate “M and P are connected.” The question therefore arises, how we are to discover “All M is P,” and this question Wundt answers by adding an inductive method, which involves inverting the inductive syllogism in the style of Aristotle into a deductive syllogism from a hypothesis in the style of Jevons, thus:—
| (1) | (2) | |
| S is P. | Every | M is P. |
| S is M. | S is M. | |
| ∴M and P are connected. | ∴ | S is P. |
He agrees with Jevons in calling this second syllogism analytical deduction, and with Jevons and Sigwart in calling it hypothetical deduction. It is, in fact, a common point of Jevons, Sigwart and Wundt that the universal is not really a conclusion inferred from given particulars, but a hypothetical major premise from which given particulars are inferred, and that this major contains presuppositions of causation not contained in the particulars.
It is noticeable that Wundt quotes Newton’s discovery of the centripetal force of the planets to the sun as an instance of this supposed hypothetical, analytic, inductive method; as if Newton’s analysis were a hypothesis of the centripetal force to the sun, a deduction of the given facts of planetary motion, and a verification of the hypothesis by the given facts, and as if such a process of hypothetical deduction could be identical with either analysis or induction. The abuse of this instance of Newtonian analysis betrays the whole origin of the current confusion of induction with deduction. One confusion has led to another. Mill confused Newton’s analytical deduction with hypothetical deduction; and thereupon Jevons confused induction with both. The result is that both Sigwart and Wundt transform the inductive process of adducing particular examples to induce a universal law into a deductive process of presupposing a universal law as a ground to deduce particular consequences. But we can easily extricate ourselves from these confusions by comparing induction with different kinds of deduction. The point about induction is that it starts from experience, and that, though in most classes we can experience only some particulars individually, yet we infer all. Hence induction cannot be reduced to Aristotle’s inductive syllogism, because experience cannot give the convertible premise, “Every S is M, and every M is S”; that “All A, B, C are magnets” is, but that “All magnets are A, B, C” is not, a fact of experience. For the same reason induction cannot be reduced to analytical deduction of the second kind in the form, S–P, M–S, ∴ M–P; because, though both end in a universal conclusion, the limits of experience prevent induction from such inference as:—
| Every experienced magnet attracts iron. |
| Every magnet whatever is every experienced magnet. |
| ∴Every magnet whatever attracts iron. |
Still less can induction be reduced to analytical deduction of the first kind in the form—P–M, S–P, ∴ S–M, of which Newton has left so conspicuous an example in his Principia. As the example shows, that analytic process starts from the scientific knowledge of a universal and convertible law (every M is P, and every P is M), e.g. a mechanical law of all centripetal force, and ends in a particular application, e.g. this centripetal force of planets to the sun. But induction cannot start from a known law. Hence it is that Jevons, followed by Sigwart and Wundt, reduces it to deduction from a hypothesis in the form “Let every M be P, S is M, ∴ S is P.” There is a superficial resemblance between induction and this hypothetical deduction. Both in a way use given particulars as evidence. But in induction the given particulars are the evidence by which we discover the universal, e.g. particular magnets attracting iron are the origin of an inference that all do; in hypothetical deduction, the universal is the evidence by which we explain the given particulars, as when we suppose undulating aether to explain the facts of heat and light. In the former process, the given particulars are the data from which we infer the universal; in the latter, they are only the consequent facts by which we verify it. Or rather, there are two uses of induction: inductive discovery before deduction, and inductive verification after deduction. But neither use of induction is the same as the deduction itself: the former precedes, the latter follows it. Lastly, the theory of Mill, though frequently adopted, e.g. by B. Erdmann, need not detain us long. Most inductions are made without any assumption of the uniformity of nature; for, whether it is itself induced, or a priori or postulated, this like every assumption is a judgment, and most men are incapable of judgment on so universal a scale, when they are quite capable of induction. The fact is that the uniformity of nature stands to induction as the axioms of syllogism do to syllogism; they are not premises, but conditions of inference, which ordinary men use spontaneously, as was pointed out in Physical Realism, and afterwards in Venn’s Empirical Logic. The axiom of contradiction is not a major premise of a judgment: the dictum de omni et nullo is not a major premise of a syllogism: the principle of uniformity is not a major premise of an induction. Induction, in fact, is no species of deduction; they are opposite processes, as Aristotle regarded them except in the one passage where he was reducing the former to the latter, and as Bacon always regarded them. But it is easy to confuse them by mistaking examples of deduction for inductions. Thus Whewell mistook Kepler’s inference that Mars moves in an ellipse for an induction, though it required the combination of Tycho’s and Kepler’s observations, as a minor, with the laws of conic sections discovered by the Greeks, as a major, premise. Jevons, in his Principles of Science, constantly makes the same sort of mistake. For example, the inference from the similarity between solar spectra and the spectra of various gases on the earth to the existence of similar gases in the sun, is called by him an induction; but it really is an analytical deduction from effect to cause, thus:—
| Such and such spectra are effects of various gases. |
| Solar spectra are such spectra. |
| ∴Solar spectra are effects of those gases. |
In the same way, to infer a machine from hearing the regular tick of a clock, to infer a player from finding a pack of cards arranged in suits, to infer a human origin of stone implements, and all such inferences from patent effects to latent causes, though they appear to Jevons to be typical inductions, are really deductions which, besides the minor premise stating the particular effects, require a major premise discovered by a previous induction and stating the general kind of effects of a general kind of cause. B. Erdmann, again, has invented an induction from particular predicates to a totality of predicates which he calls “ergänzende Induction,” giving as an example, “This body has the colour, extensibility and specific gravity of magnesium; therefore it is magnesium.” But this inference contains the tacit major, “What has a given colour, &c., is magnesium,” and is a syllogism of recognition. A deduction is often like an induction, in inferring from particulars; the difference is that deduction combines a law in the major with the particulars in the minor premise, and infers syllogistically that the particulars of the minor have the predicate of the major premise, whereas induction uses the particulars simply as instances to generalize a law. An infallible sign of an induction is that the subject and predicate of the universal conclusion are merely those of the particular instances generalized; e.g. “These magnets attract iron, ∴ all do.”
This brings us to another source of error. As we have seen, Jevons, Sigwart and Wundt all think that induction contains a belief in causation, in a cause, or ground, which is not present in the particular facts of experience, but is contributed by a hypothesis added as a major premise to the particulars in order to explain them by the cause or ground. Not so; when an induction is causal, the particular instances are already beliefs in particular causes, e.g. “My right hand is exerting pressure reciprocally with my left,” “A, B, C magnets attract iron”; and the problem is to generalize these causes, not to introduce them. Induction is not introduction. It would make no difference to the form of induction, if, as Kant thought, the notion of causality is a priori; for even Kant thought that it is already contained in experience. But whether Kant be right or wrong, Wundt and his school are decidedly wrong in supposing “supplementary notions which are not contained in experience itself, but are gained by a process of logical treatment of this experience”; as if our behalf in causality could be neither a posteriori nor a priori, but beyond experience wake up in a hypothetical major premise of induction. Really, we first experience that particular causes have particular effects; then induce that causes similar to those have effects similar to these; finally, deduce that when a particular cause of the kind occurs it has a particular effect of the kind by synthetic deduction, and that when a particular effect of the kind occurs it has a particular cause of the kind by analytic deduction with a convertible premise, as when Newton from planetary motions, like terrestrial motions, analytically deduced a centripetal force to the sun like centripetal forces to the earth. Moreover, causal induction is itself both synthetic and analytic: according as experiment combines elements into a compound, or resolves a compound into elements, it is the origin of a synthetic or an analytic generalization. Not, however, that all induction is causal; but where it is not, there is still less reason for making it a deduction from hypothesis. When from the fact that the many crows in our experience are black, we induce the probability that all crows whatever are black, the belief in the particulars is quite independent of this universal. How then can this universal be called, as Sigwart, for example, calls it, the ground from which these particulars follow? I do not believe that the crows I have seen are black because all crows are black, but vice versa. Sigwart simply inverts the order of our knowledge. In all induction, as Aristotle said, the particulars are the evidence, or ground of our knowledge (principium cognoscendi), of the universal. In causal induction, the particulars further contain the cause, or ground of the being (principium essendi), of the effect, as well as the ground of our inducing the law. In all induction the universal is the conclusion, in none a major premise, and in none the ground of either the being or the knowing of the particulars. Induction is generalization. It is not syllogism in the form of Aristotle’s or Wundt’s inductive syllogism, because, though starting only from some particulars, it concludes with a universal; it is not syllogism in the form called inverse deduction by Jevons, reduction by Sigwart, inductive method by Wundt, because it often uses particular facts of causation to infer universal laws of causation; it is not syllogism in the form of Mill’s syllogism from a belief in uniformity of nature, because few men have believed in uniformity, but all have induced from particulars to universals. Bacon alone was right in altogether opposing induction to syllogism, and in finding inductive rules for the inductive process from particular instances of presence, absence in similar circumstances, and comparison.
5. Inference in General.—There are, as we have seen (ad init.), three types—syllogism, induction and analogy. Different as they are, the three kinds have something in common: first, they are all processes from similar to similar; secondly, they all consist in combining two judgments so as to cause a third, whether expressed in so many propositions or not; thirdly, as a judgment is a belief in being, they all proceed from premises which are beliefs in being to a conclusion which is a belief in being. Nevertheless, simple as this account appears, it is opposed in every point to recent logic. In the first place, the point of Bradley’s logic is that “similarity is not a principle which works. What operates is identity, and that identity is a universal.” This view makes inference easy: induction is all over before it begins; for, according to Bradley, “every one of the instances is already a universal proposition; and it is not a particular fact or phenomenon at all,” so that the moment you observe that this magnet attracts iron, you ipso facto know that every magnet does so, and all that remains for deduction is to identify a second magnet as the same with the first, and conclude that it attracts iron. In dealing with Bradley’s works we feel inclined to repeat what Aristotle says of the discourses of Socrates: they all exhibit excellence, cleverness, novelty and inquiry, but their truth is a difficult matter; and the Socratic paradox that virtue is knowledge is not more difficult than the Bradleian paradox that as two different things are the same, inference is identification. The basis of Bradley’s logic is the fallacious dialectic of Hegel’s metaphysics, founded on the supposition that two things, which are different, but have something in common, are the same. For example, according to Hegel, being and not-being are both indeterminate and therefore the same. “If,” says Bradley, “A and B, for instance, both have lungs or gills, they are so far the same.” The answer to Hegel is that being and not-being are at most similarly indeterminate, and to Bradley that each animal has its own different lungs, whereby they are only similar. If they were the same, then in descending, two things, one of which has healthy and the other diseased lungs, would be the same; and in ascending, two things, one of which has lungs and the other has not, but both of which have life, e.g. plants and animals, would be so far the same. There would be no limit to identity either downwards or upwards; so that a man would be the same as a man-of-war, and all things would be the same thing, and not different parts of one universe. But a thing which has healthy lungs and a thing which has diseased lungs are only similar individuals numerically different. Each individual thing is the same only with itself, although related to other things; and each individual of a class has its own individual, though similar, attributes. The consequence of this true metaphysics to logic is twofold: on the one hand, one singular or particular judgment, e.g. “this magnet attracts iron,” is not another, e.g. “that magnet attracts iron,” and neither is universal; on the other hand, a universal judgment, e.g. “every magnet attracts iron,” means, distributively, that each individual magnet exerts its individual attraction, though it is similar to other magnets exerting similar attractions. A universal is not “one identical point,” but one distributive whole. Hence in a syllogism, a middle term, e.g. magnets, is “absolutely the same,” not in the sense of “one identical point” making each individual the same as any other, as Bradley supposes, but only in the sense of one whole class, or total of many similar individuals, e.g. magnets, each of which is separately though similarly a magnet, not magnet in general. Hence also induction is a real process, because, when we know that this individual magnet attracts iron, we are very far from knowing that all alike do so similarly; and the question of inductive logic, how we get from some similars to all similars, remains, as before, a difficulty, but not to be solved by the fallacy that inference is identification.
Secondly, a subordinate point in Bradley’s logic is that there are inferences which are not syllogisms; and this is true. But when he goes on to propose, as a complete independent inference, “A is to the right of B, B is to the right of C, therefore A is to the right of C,” he confuses two different operations. When A, B and C are objects of sense, their relative positions are matters, not of inference, but of observation; when they are not, there is an inference, but a syllogistic inference with a major premise induced from previous observations, “whenever of three things the first is to the right of the second, and the second to the right of the third, the first is to the right of the third.” To reply that this universal judgment is not expressed, or that its expression is cumbrous, is no answer, because, whether expressed or not, it is required for the thought. As Aristotle puts it, the syllogism is directed “not to the outer, but to the inner discourse,” or as we should say, not to the expression but to the thought, not to the proposition but to the judgment, and to the inference not verbally but mentally. Bradley seems to suppose that the major premise of a syllogism must be explicit, or else is nothing at all. But it is often thought without being expressed, and to judge the syllogism by its mere explicit expression is to commit an ignoratio elenchi; for it has been known all along that we express less than we think, and the very purpose of syllogistic logic is to analyse the whole thought necessary to the conclusion. In this syllogistic analysis two points must always be considered: one, that we usually use premises in thought which we do not express; and the other, that we sometimes use them unconsciously, and therefore infer and reason unconsciously, in the manner excellently described by Zeller in his Vorträge, iii. pp. 249-255. Inference is a deeper thinking process from judgments to judgment, which only occasionally and partially emerges in the linguistic process from propositions to proposition. We may now then reassert two points about inference against Bradley’s logic: the first, that it is a process from similar to similar, and not a process of identification, because two different things are not at all the same thing; the second, that it is the mental process from judgments to judgment rather than the linguistic process from propositions to proposition, because, besides the judgments expressed in propositions, it requires judgments which are not always expressed, and are sometimes even unconscious.
Our third point is that, as a process of judgments, inference is a process of concluding from two beliefs in being to another belief in being, and not an ideal construction, because a judgment does not always require ideas, but is always a belief about things, existing or not. This point is challenged by all the many ideal theories of judgment already quoted. If, for example, judgment were an analysis of an aggregate idea as Wundt supposes, it would certainly be true with him to conclude that “as judgment is an immediate, inference is a mediate, reference of the members of an aggregate of ideas to one another.” But really a judgment is a belief that something, existing, or thinkable, or nameable or what not, is (or is not) determined; and inference is a process from and to such beliefs in being. Hence the fallacy of those who, like Bosanquet, or like Paulsen in his Einleitung in die Philosophie, represent the realistic theory of inference as if it meant that knowledge starts from ideas and then infers that ideas are copies of things, and who then object, rightly enough, that we could not in that case compare the copy with the original, but only be able to infer from idea to idea. But there is another realism which holds that inference is a process neither from ideas to ideas, nor from ideas to things, but from beliefs to beliefs, from judgments about things in the premises to judgments about similar things in the conclusion. Logical inference never goes through the impossible process of premising nothing but ideas, and concluding that ideas are copies of things. Moreover, as we have shown, our primary judgments of sense are beliefs founded on sensations without requiring ideas, and are beliefs, not merely that something is determined, but that it is determined as existing; and, accordingly, our primary inferences from these sensory judgments of existence are inferences that other things beyond sense are similarly determined as existing. First press your lips together and then press a pen between them: you will not be conscious of perceiving any ideas: you will be conscious first of perceiving one existing lip exerting pressure reciprocally with the other existing lip; then, on putting the pen between your lips, of perceiving each lip similarly exerting pressure, but not with the other; and consequently of inferring that each existing lip is exerting pressure reciprocally with another existing body, the pen. Inference then, though it is accompanied by ideas, is not an ideal construction, nor a process from idea to idea, nor a process from idea to thing, but a process from direct to indirect beliefs in things, and originally in existing things. Logic cannot, it is true, decide what these things are, nor what the senses know about them, without appealing to metaphysics and psychology. But, as the science of inference, it can make sure that inference, on the one hand, starts from sensory judgments about sensible things and logically proceeds to inferential judgments about similar things beyond sense, and, on the other hand, cannot logically go beyond the similar. These are the limits within which logical inference works, because its nature essentially consists in proceeding from two judgments to another about similar things, existing or not.
6. Truth.—Finally, though sensory judgment is always true of its sensible object, inferential judgments are not always true, but are true so far as they are logically inferred, however indirectly, from sense; and knowledge consists of sense, memory after sense and logical inference from sense, which, we must remember, is not merely the outer sense of our five senses, but also the inner sense of ourselves as conscious thinking persons. We come then at last to the old question—What is truth? Truth proper, as Aristotle said in the Metaphysics, is in the mind: it is not being, but one’s signification of being. Its requisites are that there are things to be known and powers of knowing things. It is an attribute of judgments and derivatively of propositions. That judgment is true which apprehends a thing as it is capable of being known to be; and that proposition is true which so asserts the thing to be. Or, to combine truth in thought and in speech, the true is what signifies a thing as it is capable of being known. Secondarily, the thing itself is ambiguously said to be true in the sense of being signified as it is. For example, as I am weary and am conscious of being weary, my judgment and proposition that I am weary are true because they signify what I am and know myself to be by direct consciousness; and my being weary is ambiguously said to be true because it is so signified. But it will be said that Kant has proved that real truth, in the sense of the “agreement of knowledge with the object,” is unattainable, because we could compare knowledge with the object only by knowing both. Sigwart, indeed, adopting Kant’s argument, concludes that we must be satisfied with consistency among the thoughts which presuppose an existent; this, too, is the reason why he thinks that induction is reduction, on the theory that we can show the necessary consequence of the given particular, but that truth of fact is unattainable. But Kant’s criticism and Sigwart’s corollary only derive plausibility from a false definition of truth. Truth is not the agreement of knowledge with an object beyond itself, and therefore ex hypothesi unknowable, but the agreement of our judgments with the objects of our knowledge. A judgment is true whenever it is a belief that a thing is determined as it is known to be by sense, or by memory after sense, or by inference from sense, however indirect the inference may be, and even when in the form of inference of non-existence it extends consequently from primary to secondary judgments. Thus the judgments “this sensible pressure exists,” “that sensible pressure existed,” “other similar pressures exist,” “a conceivable centaur does not exist but is a figment,” are all equally true, because they are in accordance with one or other of these kinds of knowledge. Consequently, as knowledge is attainable by sense, memory and inference, truth is also attainable, because, though we cannot test what we know by something else, we can test what we judge and assert by what we know. Not that all inference is knowledge, but it is sometimes. The aim of logic in general is to find the laws of all inference, which, so far as it obeys those laws, is always consistent, but is true or false according to its data as well as its consistency; and the aim of the special logic of knowledge is to find the laws of direct and indirect inferences from sense, because as sense produces sensory judgments which are always true of the sensible things actually perceived, inference from sense produces inferential judgments which, so far as they are consequent on sensory judgments, are always true of things similar to sensible things, by the very consistency of inference, or, as we say, by parity of reasoning. We return then to the old view of Aristotle, that truth is believing in being; that sense is true of its immediate objects, and reasoning from sense true of its mediate objects; and that logic is the science of reasoning with a view to truth, or Logica est ars ratiocinandi, ut discernatur verum a falso. All we aspire to add is that, in order to attain to real truth, we must proceed gradually from sense, memory and experience through analogical particular inference, to inductive and deductive universal inference or reasoning. Logic is the science of all inference, beginning from sense and ending in reason.
In conclusion, the logic of the last quarter of the 19th century may be said to be animated by a spirit of inquiry, marred by a love of paradox and a corresponding hatred of tradition. But we have found, on the whole, that logical tradition rises superior to logical innovation. There are two old logics which still remain indispensable, Aristotle’s Organon and Bacon’s Novum Organum. If, and only if, the study of deductive logic begins with Aristotle, and the study of inductive logic with Aristotle and Bacon, it will be profitable to add the works of the following recent German and English authors:—
Authorities.—J. Bergmann, Reine Logik (Berlin, 1879); Die Grundprobleme der Logik (2nd ed., Berlin, 1895); B. Bosanquet, Logic (Oxford, 1888); The Essentials of Logic (London, 1895); F. H. Bradley, The Principles of Logic (London, 1883); F. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Vienna, 1874); R. F. Clarke, Logic (London, 1889); W. L. Davidson, The Logic of Definition (London, 1885); E. Dühring, Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie (Leipzig, 1878); B. Erdmann, Logik (Halle, 1892); T. Fowler, Bacon’s Novum Organum, edited, with introduction, notes, &c. (2nd ed., Oxford, 1889); T. H. Green, Lectures on Logic, in Works, vol. iii. (London, 1886); J. G. Hibben, Inductive Logic (Edinburgh and London, 1896); F. Hillebrand, Die neuen Theorien der kategorischen Schlüsse (Vienna, 1891); L. T. Hobhouse, The Theory of Knowledge (London, 1896); H. Hughes, The Theory of Inference (London, 1894); E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Halle, 1891, 1901); W. Jerusalem, Die Urtheilsfunction (Vienna and Leipzig, 1895); W. Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science (3rd ed., London, 1879); Studies in Deductive Logic (London, 1880); H. W. B. Joseph, Introduction to Logic (1906); E. E. Constance Jones, Elements of Logic (Edinburgh, 1890); G. H. Joyce, Principles of Logic (1908); J. N. Keynes, Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (2nd ed., London, 1887); F. A. Lange, Logische Studien (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1894); T. Lipps, Grundzüge der Logik (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1893); R. H. Lotze, Logik (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1881, English translation edited by B. Bosanquet, Oxford, 1884); Grundzüge der Logik (Diktate) (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1891, English translation by G. T. Ladd, Boston, 1887); Werner Luthe, Beiträge zur Logik (Berlin, 1872, 1877); Members of Johns Hopkins University, Studies in Logic (edited by C. S. Peirce, Boston, 1883); J. B. Meyer, Ueberweg’s System der Logik, fünfte vermehrte Auflage (Bonn, 1882); Max Müller, Science of Thought (London, 1887); Carveth Read, On the Theory of Logic (London, 1878); Logic, Deductive and Inductive (2nd ed., London, 1901); E. Schröder, Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (Leipzig, 1890, 1891, 1895); W. Schuppe, Erkenntnistheoretische Logik (Bonn, 1878); Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie und Logik (Berlin, 1894); R. Shute, A Discourse on Truth (London, 1877); Alfred Sidgwick, Fallacies (London, 1883); The Use of Words in Reasoning (London, 1901); C. Sigwart, Logik (2nd ed., Freiburg-i.-Br. and Leipzig, 1889–1893, English translation by Helen Dendy, London, 1895); K. Uphues, Grundlehren der Logik (Breslau, 1883); J. Veitch, Institutes of Logic (Edinburgh and London, 1885); J. Venn, Symbolic Logic (2nd ed., London, 1894); The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (London, 1889); J. Volkelt, Erfahren und Denken (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1886); T. Welton, A Manual of Logic (London, 1891, 1896); W. Windelband, Präludien (Freiburg-i.-Br., 1884); W. Wundt, Logik (2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1893–1895). Text-books are not comprised in this list. (T. Ca.)
II. History
Logic cannot dispense with the light afforded by its history so long as counter-solutions of the same fundamental problems continue to hold the field. A critical review of some of the chief types of logical theory, with a view to determine development, needs no further justification.
Logic arose, at least for the Western world, in the golden age of Greek speculation which culminated in Plato and Aristotle. There is an Indian logic, it is true, but its priority is more than disputable. In any case no influence upon Greek thought can be shown. The movement which ends in the logic of Aristotle is demonstrably self-contained. When we have shaken ourselves free of the prejudice that all stars are first seen in the East, Oriental attempts at analysis of the structure of thought may be treated as negligible.
It is with Aristotle that the bookish tradition begins to dominate the evolution of logic. The technical perfection of the analysis which he offers is, granted the circle of presuppositions within which it works, so decisive, that what precedes, even Plato’s logic, is not unnaturally regarded as merely preliminary and subsidiary to it. What follows is inevitably, whether directly or indirectly, by sympathy or by antagonism, affected by the Aristotelian tradition.
A. Greek Logic
i. Before Aristotle
Logic needs as its presuppositions that thought should distinguish itself from things and from sense, that the problem of validity should be seen to be raised in the field of thought itself, and that analysis of the structure of thought should be recognized as the one way of solution. The physical philosophers. Thought is somewhat late in coming to self-consciousness. Implied in every contrast of principle and fact, of rule and application, involved as we see after the event, most decisively when we react correctly upon a world incorrectly perceived, thought is yet not reflected on in the common experience. Its so-called natural logic is only the potentiality of logic. The same thing is true of the first stage of Greek philosophy. In seeking for a single material principle underlying the multiplicity of phenomena, the first nature-philosophers, Thales and the rest, did indeed raise the problem of the one and the many, the endeavour to answer which must at last lead to logic. But it is only from a point of view won by later speculation that it can be said that they sought to determine the predicates of the single subject-reality, or to establish the permanent subject of varied and varying predicates.[1] The direction of their inquiry is persistently outward. They hope to explain the opposed appearance and reality wholly within the world of things, and irrespective of the thought that thinks things. Their universal is still a material one. The level of thought on which they move is still clearly pre-logical. It is an advance on this when Heraclitus[2] opposes to the eyes and ears which are bad witnesses “for such as understand not their language” a common something which we would do well to follow; or again when in the incommensurability of the diagonal and side of a square the Pythagoreans stumbled upon what was clearly neither thing nor image of sense, but yet was endowed with meaning, and henceforth were increasingly at home with symbol and formula. So far, however, it might well be that thought, contradistinguished from sense with its illusions, was itself infallible. A further step, then, was necessary, and it was taken at any rate by the Eleatics, when they opposed their thought to the thought of others, as the way of truth in contrast to the way of opinion. If Eleatic thought stands over against Pythagorean thought as what is valid or grounded against what is ungrounded or invalid, we are embarked upon dialectic, or the debate in which thought is countered by thought. Claims to a favourable verdict must now be substantiated in this field and in this field alone. It was Zeno, the controversialist of the Eleatic school, who was regarded in after times as the “discoverer” of dialectic.[3]
Zeno’s amazing skill in argumentation and his paradoxical conclusions, particular and general, inaugurate a new era. “The philosophical mind,” says waiter Pater,[4] “will perhaps never be quite in health, quite sane or natural again.” The give and take of thought had by a swift transformation of values come by something more than its own. Zeno’s paradoxes, notably, for example, the puzzle of Achilles and the Tortoise, are still capable of amusing the modern world. In his own age they found him imitators. And there follows the sophistic movement.
The sophists have other claims to consideration than their service to the development of logic. In the history of the origins of logic the sophistic age is simply the age of the free play of thought in which men were aware that in a sense anything can be debated and not yet aware of the sense in which The Sophists. all things cannot be so. It is the age of discussion used as a universal solvent, before it has been brought to book by a deliberate unfolding of the principles of the structure of thought determining and limiting the movement of thought itself. The sophists furthered the transition from dialectic to logic in two ways. In the first place they made it possible. Incessant questioning leads to answers. Hair-splitting, even when mischievous in intent, leads to distinctions of value. Paradoxical insistence on the accidents of speech-forms and thought-forms leads in the end to perception of the essentials. Secondly they made it necessary. The spirit of debate run riot evokes a counter-spirit to order and control it. The result is a self-limiting dialectic. This higher dialectic is a logic. It is no accident that the first of the philosophical sophists, Gorgias, on the one hand, is Eleatic in his affinities, and on the other raises in the characteristic formula of his intellectual nihilism[5] issues which are as much logical and epistemological as ontological. The meaning of the copula and the relation of thoughts to the objects of which they are the thoughts are as much involved as the nature of being. It is equally no accident that the name of Protagoras is to be connected, in Plato’s view at least, with the rival school of Heracliteans. The problems raised by the relativism of Protagoras are no less fundamentally problems of the nature of knowledge and of the structure of thought. The Theaetetus indeed, in which Plato essays to deal with them, is in the broad sense of the word logical, the first distinctively logical treatise that has come down to us. Other sophists, of course, with more practical interests, or of humbler attainments, were content to move on a lower plane of philosophical speculation. As presented to us, for example, in Plato’s surely not altogether hostile caricature in the Euthydemus, they mark the intellectual preparation for, and the moral need for, the advance of the next generation.
Among the pioneers of the sophistic age Socrates stands apart. He has no other instrument than the dialectic of his compeers, and he is as far off as the rest from a criticism of the instrument, but he uses it differently and with a difference of aim. He construes the give and take of the debate-game with extreme Socrates. rigour. The rhetorical element must be exorcised. The set harangue of teacher to pupil, in which steps in argument are slurred and the semblance of co-inquiry is rendered nugatory, must be eliminated. The interlocutors must in truth render an account under the stimulus of organized heckling from their equals or superiors in debating ability. And the aim is heuristic, though often enough the search ends in no overt positive conclusion. Something can be found and something is found. Common names are fitted for use by the would-be users being first delivered from abortive conceptions, and thereupon enabled to bring to the birth living and organic notions.
Aristotle would assign to Socrates the elaboration of two logical functions:—general definition and inductive method.[6] Rightly, if we add that he gives no theory of either, and that his practical use of the latter depends for its value on selection.[7] It is rather in virtue of his general faith in the possibility of construction, which he still does not undertake, and because of his consequent insistence on the elucidation of general concepts, which in common with some of his contemporaries, he may have thought of as endued with a certain objectivity, that he induces the controversies of what are called the Socratic schools as to the nature of predication. These result in the formulation of a new dialectic or logic by Plato. Manifestly Socrates’ use of certain forms of argumentation, like their abuse by the sophists, tended to evoke their logical analysis. The use and abuse, confronted one with the other, could not but evoke it.
The one in the many, the formula which lies at the base of the possibility of predication, is involved in the Socratic doctrine of general concepts or ideas. The nihilism of Gorgias from the Eleatic point of view of bare identity, and the speechlessness of Cratylus from the Heraclitean ground of absolute difference, are alike disowned. But the one in the many, the identity in difference, is so far only postulated, not established. When the personality of Socrates is removed, the difficulty as to the nature of the Socratic universal, developed in the medium of the individual processes of individual minds, carries disciples of diverse general sympathies, united only through the practical inspiration of the master’s life, towards the identity-formula or the difference-formula of other teachers. The paradox of predication, that it seems to deny identity, or to deny difference, becomes a pons asinorum. Knowledge involves synthesis or nexus. Yet from the points of view alike of an absolute pluralism, of a flux, and of a formula of bare identity—and a fortiori with any blending of these principles sufficiently within the bounds of plausibility to find an exponent—all knowledge, because all predication of unity, in difference, must be held to be impossible. Plato’s problem was to find a way of escape from this impasse, and among his Socratic contemporaries he seems to have singled out Antisthenes[8] as most in need of refutation. Antisthenes, starting with the doctrine of Antisthenes. identity without difference, recognizes as the only expression proper to anything its own peculiar sign, its name. This extreme of nominalism for which predication is impossible is, however, compromised by two concessions. A thing can be described as like something else. And a compound can have a λόγος or account given of it by the (literally) adequate enumeration of the names of its simple elements or πρῶτα.[9] This analytical λόγος he offers as his substitute for knowledge.[10] The simple elements still remain, sensed and named but not known. The expressions of them are simply the speech-signs for them. The account of the compound simply sets itself taken piecemeal as equivalent to itself taken as aggregate. The subject-predicate relation fails really to arise. Euclides[11] found no difficulty in fixing Antisthenes’ mode of illustrating his simple elements by comparison, and therewith perhaps the “induction” of Socrates, with the dilemma; so far as the example is dissimilar, the comparison is invalid; so far as it is similar, it is useless. It is better to say what the thing is. Between Euclides and Antisthenes the Socratic induction and universal definition were alike discredited from the point of view of the Eleatic logic. It is with the other point of doctrine that Plato comes to grips, that which allows of a certainty or knowledge consisting in an analysis of a compound into simple elements themselves not known. The syllable or combination is, he shows, not known by resolution of it into letters or elements themselves not known. An aggregate analysed into its mechanical parts is as much and as little known as they. A whole which is more than its parts is from Antisthenes’ point of view inconceivable. Propositions analytical of a combination in the sense alleged do not give knowledge. Yet knowledge is possible. The development of a positive theory of predication has become quite crucial.
Plato’s logic supplies a theory of universals in the doctrine of ideas. Upon this it bases a theory of predication, which, however, is compatible with more than one reading of the metaphysical import of the ideas. And it sets forth a dialectic with a twofold movement, towards differentiation Plato. and integration severally, which amounts to a formulation of inference. The more fully analysed movement, that which proceeds downward from less determinate to more determinate universals, is named Division. Its associations, accordingly, are to the modern ear almost inevitably those of a doctrine of classification only. Aristotle, however, treats it as a dialectical rival to syllogism, and it influenced Galilei and Bacon in their views of inference after the Renaissance. If we add to this logic of “idea,” judgment and inference, a doctrine of categories in the modern sense of the word which makes the Theaetetus, in which it first occurs, a forerunner of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we have clearly a very significant contribution to logic even in technical regard. Its general philosophical setting may be said to enhance its value even as logic.
(a) Of the idea we may say that whatever else it is, and apart from all puzzles as to ideas of relations such as smallness, of negative qualities such as injustice, or of human inventions such as beds, it is opposed to that of which it is the idea as its intelligible formula or law, the truth The “Idea.” or validity—Herbart’s word—of the phenomenon from the point of view of nexus or system. The thing of sense in its relative isolation is unstable. It is and is not. What gives stability is the insensible principle or principles which it holds, as it were, in solution. These are the ideas, and their mode of being is naturally quite other than that of the sensible phenomena which they order. The formula for an indefinite number of particular things in particular places at particular times, and all of them presentable in sensuous imagery of a given time and place, is not itself presentable in sensuous imagery side by side with the individual members of the group it orders. The law, e.g., of the equality of the radii of a circle cannot be exhibited to sense, even if equal radii may be so exhibited. It is the wealth of illustration with which Plato expresses his meaning, and the range of application which he gives the idea—to the class-concepts of natural groups objectively regarded, to categories, to aesthetic and ethical ideals, to the concrete aims of the craftsman as well as to scientific laws—that have obscured his doctrine, viz. that wherever there is law, there is an idea.
(b) The paradox of the one in the many is none, if the idea may be regarded as supplying a principle of nexus or organization to an indefinite multiplicity of particulars. But if Antisthenes is to be answered, a further step must be taken. The principle of difference must be carried The one in the many. into the field of the ideas. Not only sense is a principle of difference. The ideas are many. The multiplicity in unity must be established within thought itself. Otherwise the objection stands: man is man and good is good, but to say that man is good is clearly to say the thing that is not. Plato replies with the doctrine of the interpenetration of ideas, obviously not of all with all, but of some with some, the formula of identity in difference within thought itself. Nor can the opponent fairly refuse to admit it, if he affirms the participation of the identical with being, and denies the participation of difference with being, or affirms it with not-being. The Sophistes shows among other things that an identity-philosophy breaks down into a dualism of thought and expression, when it applies the predicate of unity to the real, just as the absolute pluralism on the other hand collapses into unity if it affirms or admits any form of relation whatsoever. Identity and difference are all-pervasive categories, and the speech-form and the corresponding thought-form involve both. For proposition and judgment involve subject and predicate and exhibit what a modern writer calls “identity of reference with diversity of characterization.” Plato proceeds to explain by his principle of difference both privative and negative predicates, and also the possibility of false predication. It is obvious that without the principle of difference error is inexplicable. Even Plato, however, perhaps scarcely shows that with it, and nothing else but it, error is explained.
(c) Plato’s Division, or the articulation of a relatively indeterminate and generic concept into species and sub-species with resultant determinate judgments, presumes of course the doctrine of the interpenetration of ideas laid down in the Sophistes as the basis of predication, but its use precedes Division. the positive development of that formula, though not, save very vaguely, the exhibition of it, negatively, in the antinomies of the one and the many in the Parmenides. It is its use, however, not the theory of it, that precedes. The latter is expounded in the Politicus (260 sqq.) and Philebus (16c sqq.). The ideal is progressively to determine a universe of discourse till true infimae species are reached, when no further distinction in the determinate many is possible, though there is still the numerical difference of the indefinite plurality of particulars. The process is to take as far as possible the form of a continuous disjunction of contraries. We must bisect as far as may be, but the division is after all to be into limbs, not parts. The later examples of the Politicus show that the permission of three or more co-ordinate species is not nugatory, and that the precept of dichotomy is merely in order to secure as little of a saltus as possible; to avoid e.g. the division of the animal world into men and brutes. It is the middle range of the μέσα of Philebus 17a that appeals to Bacon, not only this but their mediating quality that appeals to Aristotle. The media axiomata of the one and the middle term of the other lie in the phrase. Plato’s division is nevertheless neither syllogism nor exclusiva. It is not syllogism because it is based on the disjunctive, not on the hypothetical relation, and so extends horizontally where syllogism strikes vertically downward. Again it is not syllogism because it is necessarily and finally dialectical. It brings in the choice of an interlocutor at each stage, and so depends on a concession for what it should prove.[12] Nor is it Bacon’s method of exclusions, which escapes the imputation of being dialectical, if not that of being unduly cumbrous, in virtue of the cogency of the negative instance. The Platonic division was, however, offered as the scientific method of the school. A fragment of the comic poet Epicrates gives a picture of it at work.[13] And the movement of disjunction as truly has a place in the scientific specification of a concept in all its differences as the linking of lower to higher in syllogism. The two are complementary, and the reinstatement of the disjunctive judgment to the more honourable rôle in inference has been made by so notable a modern logician as Lotze.
(d) The correlative process of Combination is less elaborately sketched, but in a luminous passage in the Politicus (§ 278), in explaining by means of an example the nature and use of examples, Plato represents it as the bringing of one and the same element seen in diverse settings to Combination. conscious realization, with the result that it is viewed as a single truth of which the terms compared are now accepted as the differences. The learner is to be led forward to the unknown by being made to hark back to more familiar groupings of the alphabet of nature which he is coming to recognize with some certainty. To lead on, ἐπάγειν, is to refer back, ἀνάγειν,[14] to what has been correctly divined of the same elements in clearer cases. Introduction to unfamiliar collocations follows upon this, and, only so, is it possible finally to gather scattered examples into a conspectus as instances of one idea or law. This is not only of importance in the history of the terminology of logic, but supplies a philosophy of induction.
(e) Back of Plato’s illustration and explanation of predication and dialectical inference there lies not only the question of their metaphysical grounding in the interconnexion of ideas, but that of their epistemological presuppositions. Mental synthesis. This is dealt with in the Theaetetus (184b sqq.). The manifold affections of sense are not simply aggregated in the individual, like the heroes in the Trojan horse. There must be convergence in a unitary principle, soul or consciousness, which is that which really functions in perception, the senses and their organs being merely its instruments. It is this unity of apperception which enables us to combine the data of more than one sense, to affirm reality, unreality, identity, difference, unity, plurality and so forth, as also the good, the beautiful and their contraries. Plato calls these pervasive factors in knowledge κοινὰ, and describes them as developed by the soul in virtue of its own activity. They are objects of its reflection and made explicit in the few with pains and gradually.[15] That they are not, however, psychological or acquired categories, due to “the workmanship of the mind” as conceived by Locke, is obvious from their attribution to the structure of mind[16] and from their correlation with immanent principles of the objective order. Considered from the epistemological point of view, they are the implicit presuppositions of the construction or συλλογισμός[17] in which knowledge consists. But as ideas,[18] though of a type quite apart,[19] they have also a constitutive application to reality. Accordingly, of the selected “kinds” by means of which the interpenetration of ideas is expounded in the Sophistes, only motion and rest, the ultimate “kinds” in the physical world, have no counterparts in the “categories” of the Theaetetus. In his doctrine as to ἕν τὸ ποιοῦν or κρῖνον, as generally in that of the activity of the νοῦς ἀπαθής, Aristotle in the de Anima[20] is in the main but echoing the teaching of Plato.[21]
ii. Aristotle.
Plato’s episodic use of logical distinctions[22] is frequent. His recourse to such logical analysis as would meet the requirements of the problem in hand[23] is not rare. In the “dialectical” dialogues the question of method and of the justification of its postulates attains at least a like prominence with the ostensible subject matter. There is even formal recognition of the fact that to advance in dialectic is a greater thing than to bring any special inquiry to a successful issue.[24] But to the end there is a lack of interest in, and therefore a relative immaturity of, technique as such. In the forcing atmosphere, however, of that age of controversy, seed such as that sown in the master’s treatment of the uttered λόγος[25] quickly germinated. Plato’s successors in the Academy must have developed a system of grammatico-logical categories which Aristotle could make his own. Else much of his criticism of Platonic doctrine[26] does, indeed, miss fire. The gulf too, which the Philebus[27] apparently left unbridged between the sensuous apprehension of particulars and the knowledge of universals of even minimum generality led with Speusippus to a formula of knowledge in perception (ἐπιστημονικὴ αἴσθησις). These and like developments, which are to be divined from references in the Aristotelian writings, jejune, and, for the most part, of probable interpretation only, complete the material which Aristotle could utilize when he seceded from the Platonic school and embarked upon his own course of logical inquiry.
This is embodied in the group of treatises later known as the Organon[28] and culminates in the theory of syllogism and of demonstrative knowledge in the Analytics. All else is finally subsidiary. In the well-known sentences with which the Organon closes[29] Aristotle has been supposed Syllogism. to lay claim to the discovery of the principle of syllogism. He at least claims to have been the first to dissect the procedure of the debate-game, and the larger claim may be thought to follow. In the course of inquiry into the formal consequences from probable premises, the principle of mediation or linking was so laid bare that the advance to the analytic determination of the species and varieties of syllogism was natural. Once embarked upon such an analysis, where valid process from assured principles gave truth, Aristotle could find little difficulty in determining the formula of demonstrative knowledge or science. It must be grounded in principles of assured certainty and must demonstrate its conclusions with the use of such middle or linking terms only as it is possible to equate with the real ground or cause in the object of knowledge. Hence the account of axioms and of definitions, both of substances and of derivative attributes. Hence the importance of determining how first principles are established. It is, then, a fair working hypothesis as to the structure of the Organon to place the Topics, which deal with dialectical reasoning, before the Analytics.[30] Of the remaining treatises nothing of fundamental import depends on their order. One, however, the Categories, may be regarded with an ancient commentator,[31] as preliminary to the dialectical inquiry in the Topics. The other, on thought as expressed in language (Περὶ ἐρμηνείας) is possibly spurious, though in any case a compilation of the Aristotelian school. If genuine, its naïve theory that thought copies things and other features of its contents would tend to place it among the earliest works of the philosopher.
Production in the form of a series of relatively self-contained treatises accounts for the absence of a name and general definition of their common field of inquiry. A more important lack which results is that of any clear intimation as to the relation in which Aristotle supposed it to The logical treatises. stand to other disciplines. In his definite classification of the sciences,[32] into First Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, it has no place. Its axioms, such as the law of contradiction, belong to first philosophy, but the doctrine as a whole falls neither under this head nor yet, though the thought has been entertained, under that of mathematics, since logic orders mathematical reasoning as well as all other. The speculative sciences, indeed, are classified according to their relation to form, pure, abstract or concrete, i.e. according to their objects. The logical inquiry seems to be conceived as dealing with the thought of which the objects are objects. It is to be regarded as a propaedeutic,[33] which, although it is in contact with reality in and through the metaphysical import of the axioms, or again in the fact that the categories, though primarily taken as forms of predication, must also be regarded as kinds of being, is not directly concerned with object-reality, but with the determination for the thinking subject of what constitutes the knowledge correlative to being. Logic, therefore, is not classed as one, still less as a branch of one, among the ’ologies, ontology not excepted.
The way in which logical doctrine is developed in the Aristotelian treatises fits in with this view. Doubtless what we have is in the main a reflex of the heuristic character of Aristotle’s own work as pioneer. But it at least satisfies the requirement that the inquiry shall carry the plain man along with it. Actual modes of expression are shown to embody distinctions which average intelligence can easily recognize and will readily acknowledge, though they may tend by progressive rectification fundamentally to modify the assumption natural to the level of thought from which he begins. Thus we start[34] from the point of view of a world of separate persons and things, in which thought mirrors these concrete realities, taken as ultimate subjects of predicates. It is a world of communication of thought, where persons as thinkers need to utter in language truths objectively valid for the mundus communis. In these truths predicates are accepted or rejected by subjects, and therefore depend on the reflection of fact in λόγοι (propositions). These are combinatory of parts, attaching or detaching predicates, and so involving subject, predicate and copula.[35] At this stage we are as much concerned with speech-forms as the thought-forms of which they are conventional symbols, with Plato’s analysis, for instance, into a noun and a verb, whose connotation of time is as yet a difficulty. The universal of this stage is the universal of fact, what is recognized as predicable of a plurality of subjects. The dialectical doctrine of judgment as the declaration of one member of a disjunction by contradiction, which is later so important, is struggling with one of its initial difficulties,[36] viz. the contingency of particular events future, the solution of which remains imperfect.[37]
The doctrine of the Categories is still on the same level of thought,[38] though its grammatico-logical analysis is the more advanced one which had probably been developed by the Academy before Aristotle came to think of his friends there as “them” rather than “us.” It is The Categories. what in one direction gave the now familiar classification of parts of speech, in the other that of thought-categories underlying them. If we abstract from any actual combination of subject and predicate and proceed to determine the types of predicate asserted in simple propositions of fact, we have on the one hand a subject which is never object, a “first substance” or concrete thing, of which may be predicated in the first place “second substance” expressing that it is a member of a concrete class, and in the second place quantity, quality, correlation, action and the like. The list follows the forms of the Greek language so closely that a category emerges appropriated to the use of the perfect tense of the middle voice to express the relation of the subject to a garb that it dons. In all this the individual is the sole self-subsistent reality. Truth and error are about the individual and attach or detach predicates correctly and incorrectly. There is no committal to the metaphysics in the light of which the logical inquiry is at last to find its complete justification. The point of view is to be modified profoundly by what follows—by the doctrine of the class-concept behind the class, of the form or idea as the constitutive formula of a substance, or, again, by the requirement that an essential attribute must be grounded in the nature or essence of the substance of which it is predicated, and that such attributes alone are admissible predicates from the point of view of the strict ideal of science. But we are still on the ground of common opinion, and these doctrines are not yet laid down as fundamental to the development.
Dialectic then, though it may prove to be the ultimate method of establishing principles in philosophy,[39] starts from probable and conceded premises,[40] and deals with them only in the light of common principles such as may be reasonably appealed to or easily established against challenge. The Topics. To the expert, in any study which involves contingent matter, i.e. an irreducible element of indetermination, e.g. to the physician, there is a specific form of this, but the reflection that this is so is something of an afterthought. We start with what is prima facie given, to return upon it from the ground of principles clarified by the sifting process of dialectic[41] and certified by νοῦς. The Topics deal with dialectic and constitute an anatomy of argumentation, or, according to what seems to be Aristotle’s own metaphor, a survey of the tactical vantage-points (τόποι) for the conflict of wits in which the prize is primarily victory, though it is a barren victory unless it is also knowledge. It is in this treatise that what have been called “the conceptual categories”[42] emerge, viz. the predicables, or heads of predication as it is analysed in relation to the provisional theory of definition that dialectic allows and requires. A predicate either is expressive of the essence or part of the essence of the subject, viz. that original group of mutually underivable attributes of which the absence of any one destroys its right to the class-name, or it is not. Either it is convertible with the subject or it is not. Here then judgment, though still viewed as combinatory, has the types which belong to coherent systems of implication discriminated from those that predicate coincidence or accident, i.e. any happening not even derivatively essential from the point of view of the grouping in which the subject has found a place. In the theory of dialectic any predicate may be suggested for a subject, and if not affirmed of it, must be denied of it, if not denied must be affirmed. The development of a theory of the ground on which subjects claim their predicates and disown alien predicates could not be long postponed. In practical dialectic the unlimited possibility was reduced to manageable proportions in virtue of the groundwork of received opinion upon which the operation proceeded. It is in the Topics, further, that we clearly have a first treatment of syllogism as formal implication, with the suggestion that advance must be made to a view of its use for material implication from true and necessary principles. It is in the Topics,[43] again, that we have hints at the devices of an inductive process, which, as dialectical, throw the burden of producing contradictory instances upon the other party to the discussion. In virtue of the common-stock of opinion among the interlocutors and their potentially controlling audience, this process was more valuable than appears on the face of things. Obviously tentative, and with limits and ultimate interpretation to be determined elsewhere, it failed to bear fruit till the Renaissance, and then by the irony of fate to the discrediting of Aristotle. In any case, however, definition, syllogism, induction all invited further determination, especially if they were to take their place in a doctrine of truth or knowledge. The problem of analytic, i.e. of the resolution of the various forms of inference into their equivalents in that grouping of terms or premises which was most obviously cogent, was a legacy of the Topics. The debate-game had sought for diversion and found truth, and truth raised the logical problem on a different plane.
At first the problem of formal analysis only. We proceed with the talk of instances and concern ourselves first with relations of inclusion and exclusion. The question is as to membership of a class, and the dominant formula is the dictum de omni et nullo. Until the view of the Class concept. individual units with which we are so far familiar has undergone radical revision, the primary inquiry must be into the forms of a class-calculus. Individuals fall into groups in virtue of the possession of certain predicates. Does one group include, or exclude, or intersect another with which it is compared? We are clearly in the field of the diagrams of the text-books, and much of the phraseology is based upon an original graphic representation in extension. The middle term, though conceived as an intermediary or linking term, gets its name as intermediate in a homogeneous scheme of quantity, where it cannot be of narrower extension than the subject nor wider than the predicate of the conclusion.[44] It is also, as Aristotle adds,[45] middle in position in the syllogism that concludes to a universal affirmative.[45] Again, so long as we keep to the syllogism as complete in itself and without reference to its place in the great structure of knowledge, the nerve of proof cannot be conceived in other than a formal manner. In analytic we work with an ethos different from that of dialectic. We presume truth and not probability or concession, but a true conclusion can follow from false premises, and it is only in the attempt to derive the premises in turn from their grounds that we unmask the deception. The passage to the conception of system is still required. The Prior Analytics The Prior Analytics. then are concerned with a formal logic to be knit into a system of knowledge of the real only in virtue of a formula which is at this stage still to seek. The forms of syllogism, however, are tracked successfully through their figures, i.e. through the positions of the middle term that Aristotle recognizes as of actual employment, and all their moods, i.e. all differences of affirmative and negative, universal and particular within the figures, the cogent or legitimate forms are alone left standing, and the formal doctrine of syllogism is complete. Syllogism already defined[46] becomes through exhibition in its valid forms clear in its principle. It is a speech-and-thought-form (λόγος) in which certain matters being posited something other than the matters posited necessarily results because of them, and, though it still needs to receive a deeper meaning when presumed truth gives way to necessary truth of premises, the notion of the class to that of the class-concept, collective fact to universal law, its formal claim is manifest. “Certain matters being posited.” Subject and predicate not already seen to be conjoined must be severally known to be in relation with that which joins them, so that more than one direct conjunction must be given. “Of necessity.” If what are to be conjoined are severally in relation to a common third it does perforce relate or conjoin them. “Something other.” The conjunction was by hypothesis not given, and is a new result by no means to be reached, apart from direct perception save by use of at least two given conjunctions. “Because of them,” therefore. Yet so long as the class-view is prominent, there is a suggestion of a begging of the question. The class is either constituted by enumeration of its members, and, passing by the difficulty involved in the thought of “its” members, is an empirical universal of fact merely, or it is grounded in the class-concept. In the first case it is a formal scheme which helps knowledge and the theory of knowledge not at all. We need then to develop the alternative, and to pass from the external aspect of all-ness to the intrinsic ground of it in the universal καθ᾽ αὑτὸ καὶ ᾗ αὐτό, which, whatsoever the assistance it receives from induction in some sense of the word, in the course of its development for the individual mind, is secured against dependence on instances by the decisive fiat or guarantee of νοῦς, insight into the systematic nexus of things. The conception of linkage needs to be deepened by the realization of the middle term as the ground of nexus in a real order which is also rational.
Aristotle’s solution of the paradox of inference, viz. of the fact that in one sense to go beyond what is in the premises is fallacy, while in another sense not to go beyond them is futility, lies in his formula of implicit and explicit, potential and actual.[47] The real nexus underlying the thought-process Problem of inference. is to be articulated in the light of the voucher by intelligence as to the truth of the principles of the various departments of knowledge which we call sciences, and at the ideal limit it is possible to transform syllogism into systematic presentation, so that, differently written down, it is definition. But for human thought sense, with its accidental setting in matter itself incognizable is always with us. The activity of νοῦς is never Nous. so perfectly realized as to merge implication in intuition. Syllogism must indeed be objective, i.e. valid for any thinker, but it is also a process in the medium of individual thinking, whereby new truth is reached. A man may know that mules are sterile and that the beast before him is a mule, and yet believe her to be in foal “not viewing the several truths in connexion.”[48] The doctrine, then, that the universal premise contains the conclusion not otherwise than potentially is with Aristotle cardinal. The datum of sense is only retained through the universal.[49] It is possible to take a universal view with some at least of the particular instances left uninvestigated.[50] Recognition that the class-concept is applicable may be independent of knowledge of much that it involves. Knowledge of the implications of it does not depend on observation of all members of the class. Syllogism as formula for the exhibition of truth attained, and construction or what not as the instrumental process by which we reach the truth, have with writers since Hegel and Herbart tended to fall apart. Aristotle’s view is other. Both are syllogisms, though in different points of view. For this reason, if for no other, the conception of movement from the potential possession of knowledge to its actualization remains indispensable. Whether this is explanation or description, a problem or its solution, is of course another matter.
In the Posterior Analytics the syllogism is brought into decisive connexion with the real by being set within a system in which its function is that of material implication from principles which are primary, immediate and necessary truths. Hitherto the assumption of the Posterior Analytics. probable as true rather than as what will be conceded in debate[51] has been the main distinction of the standpoint of analytic from that of dialectic. But the true is true only in reference to a coherent system in which it is an immediate ascertainment of νοῦς, or to be deduced from a ground which is such. The ideal of science or demonstrative knowledge is to exhibit as flowing from the definitions and postulates of a science, from its special principles, by the help only of axioms or principles common to all knowledge, and these not as premises but as guiding rules, all the properties of the subject-matter, i.e. all the predicates that belong to it in its own nature. In the case of any subject-kind, its definition and its existence being avouched by νοῦς, “heavenly body” for example, the problem is, given the fact of a non-self-subsistent characteristic of it, such as the eclipse of the said body, to find a ground, a μέσον which expressed the αἴτιον, in virtue of which the adjectival concept can be exhibited as belonging to the subject-concept καθ᾽ αὑτὸ in the strictly adequate sense of the phrase in which it means also ᾗ αὐτό.[52] We are under the necessity then of revising the point of view of the syllogism of all-ness. We discard the conception of the universal as a predicate applicable to a plurality, or even to all, of the members of a group. To know merely κατὰ παντὸς is not to know, save accidentally. The exhaustive judgment, if attainable, could not be known to be exhaustive. The universal is the ground of the empirical “all” and not conversely. A formula such as the equality of the interior angles of a triangle to two right angles is only scientifically known when it is not of isosceles or scalene triangle that it is known, nor even of all the several types of triangle collectively, but as a predicate of triangle recognized as the widest class-concept of which it is true, the first stage in the progressive differentiation of figure at which it can be asserted.[53]
Three points obviously need development, the nature of definition, its connexion with the syllogism in which the middle term is cause or ground, and the way in which we have assurance of our principles.
Definition is either of the subject-kind or of the property that is grounded in it. Of the self-subsistent definition is οὐσίας τις γνωρισμός[54] by exposition of genus and differentia.[55] It is indemonstrable. It presumes the reality of its subject Definition. in a postulate of existence. It belongs to the principles of demonstration. Summa genera and groups below infimae species are indefinable. The former are susceptible of elucidation by indication of what falls under them. The latter are only describable by their accidents. There can here be no true differentia. The artificiality of the limit to the articulation of species was one of the points to which the downfall of Aristotle’s influence was largely due. Of a non-self-subsistent or attributive conception definition in its highest attainable form is a recasting of the syllogism, in which it was shown that the attribute was grounded in the substance or self-subsistent subject of which it is. Eclipse of the moon, e.g. is privation of light from the moon by the interposition of the earth between it and the sun. In the scientific syllogism the interposition of the earth is the middle term, the cause or “because” (διότι), the residue of the definition is conclusion. The difference then is in verbal expression, way of putting, inflexion.[56] If we pluck the fruit of the conclusion, severing its nexus with the stock from which it springs, we have an imperfect form of definition, while, if further we abandon all idea of making it adequate by exhibition of its ground, we have, with still the same form of words, a definition merely nominal or lexicographical. In the aporematic treatment of the relation of definition and syllogism identical as to one form and in one view, distinct as to another form and in another view, much of Aristotle’s discussion consists. The middle term. The rest is a consideration of scientific inquiry as converging in μέσου ζήτησις, the investigation of the link or “because” as ground in the nature of things. Τὸ μὲν γὰρ αἴτιον τὸ μέσον[57] real ground and thought link fall together. The advance from syllogism as formal implication is a notable one. It is not enough to have for middle term a causa cognoscendi merely. We must have a causa essendi. The planets are near, and we know it by their not twinkling,[58] but science must conceive their nearness as the cause of their not twinkling and make the prius in the real order the middle term of its syllogism. In this irreversible catena proceeding from ground to consequent, we have left far behind such things as the formal parity of genus and differentia considered as falling under the same predicable,[59] and hence justified in part Porphyry’s divergence from the scheme of predicables. We need devices, indeed, to determine priority or superior claim to be “better known absolutely or in the order of nature,” but on the whole the problem is fairly faced.[60]
Of science Aristotle takes for his examples sometimes celestial physics, more often geometry or arithmetic, sometimes a concrete science, e.g. botany.[61] In the field of pure form, free from the disconcerting surprises of sensible matter and so of absolute necessity, no difficulty arises as to the deducibility of the whole body of a science from its first principles. In the sphere of abstract form, mathematics, the like may be allowed, abstraction being treated as an elimination of matter from the σύνολον by one act. When we take into account relative matter, however, and traces of a conception of abstraction as admitting of degree,[62] the question is not free from difficulty. In the sphere of the concrete sciences where law obtains only ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ this ideal of science can clearly find only a relative satisfaction with large reserves. In any case, however, the problem as to first principles remains fundamental.
If we reject the infinite regress and the circle in proof (circulus in probando) which resolves itself ultimately into proving A by B and B by A,[63] we are confronted by the need for principles of two kinds, those which condition all search for truth, and those which are the peculiar or proper Formal and scientific principles. principles of special sciences, their “positions,” viz. the definitions of their subjects and the postulates of the existence of these. All are indemonstrable and cannot be less sure than the body of doctrine that flows from them. They must indeed be recognized as true, primary, causative and the like. But[64] they are not congenitally present in the individual in a determinate shape. The doctrine of latency is mystical and savours of Plato’s reminiscence (anamnesis). Yet they must have something to develop from, and thereupon Aristotle gives an account of a process in the psychological mechanism which he illustrates by comparative psychology, wherein a λόγος or meaning emerges, Induction and dialectic. a “first” universal recognized by induction. Yet νοῦς, intelligence, is the principle of first principles. It is infallible, while, whatever the case with perception of the special sensibles,[65] the process which combines particulars is not. On the side of induction we find that experience is said to give the specific principles,[66] “the phenomena being apprehended in sufficiency.” On the side of intuition, self-evidence of scientific principles is spoken of.[67] Yet dialectic is auxiliary and of methodological importance in their establishment.[68] Mutually limiting statements occur almost or quite side by side. We cannot take first principles “as the bare precipitate of a progressively refined analysis”[69] nor on the other as constitutive a priori forms. The solution seems to lie in the conception of a process that has a double aspect. On the one hand we have confrontation with fact, in which, in virtue of the rational principle which is the final cause of the phenomenal order, intelligence will find satisfaction. On the other we have a stage at which the rational but as yet not reasoned concepts developed in the medium of the psychological mechanism are subjected to processes of reflective comparison and analysis, and, with some modification, maintained against challenge, till at length the ultimate universals emerge, which rational insight can posit as certain, and the whole hierarchy of concepts from the “first” universals to τὰ ἀμερῆ are intuited in a coherent system. Aristotle’s terminology is highly technical, but, as has often been observed, not therefore clear. Here two words at least are ambiguous, “principle” and “induction.” By the first he means any starting-point, “that from which the matter in question is primarily to be known,”[70] particular facts therefore, premises, and what not. What then is meant by principles when we ask in the closing chapter of his logic how they become known? The data of sense are clearly not the principles in question here. The premises of scientific syllogisms may equally be dismissed. Where they are not derivative they clearly are definitions or immediate transcripts from definitions. There remain, then, primary definitions and the postulates of their realization, and the axioms or common principles, “which he must needs have who is to reach any knowledge.”[71] In the case of the former, special each to its own science, Aristotle may be thought to hold that they are the product of the psychological mechanism, but are ascertained only when they have faced the fire of a critical dialectic and have been accepted from the point of view of the integral rationality of the system of concepts. Axioms, on the other hand, in which the sciences interconnect[72] through the employment of them in a parity of relation, seem to be implicit indeed in the psychological mechanism, but to come to a kind of explicitness in the first reflective reaction upon it, and without reference to any particular content of it. They are not to be used as premises but as immanent laws of thought, save only when an inference from true or admitted premises and correct in form is challenged. The challenge must be countered in a reductio ad impossibile in which the dilemma is put. Either this conclusion or the denial of rationality. Even these principles, however, may get a greater explicitness by dialectical treatment.[73] The relation, then, of the two orders of principle to the psychological mechanism is different. The kind of warrant that intelligence can give to specific principles falls short of infallibility. Celestial physics, with its pure forms and void of all matter save extension, is not such an exemplary science after all. Rationality is continuous throughout. A λόγος emerges with some beings in direct sequence upon the persistence of impressions.[74] Sense is of the “first” universal, the form, though not of the ultimate universal. The rally from the rout in Aristotle’s famous metaphor is of units that already belong together, that are of the same regiment or order. On the other hand, rationality has two stages. In the one it is relatively immersed in sense, in the other relatively free. The same break is to be found in the conception of the relation of receptive to active mind in the treatise Of the Soul.[75] The one is impressed by things and receives their form without their matter. The other is free from impression. It thinks its system of concepts freely on the occasion of the affections of the receptivity. Aristotle is fond of declaring that knowledge is of the universal, while existence or reality is individual. It seems to follow that the cleavage between knowledge and reality is not bridged by the function of νοῦς in relation to “induction.” What is known is not real, and what is real is not known. The Knowledge and reality. nodus[76] has its cause in the double sense of the word “universal” and a possible solution in the doctrine of εἶδος. The “form” of a thing constitutes it what it is, and at the same time, therefore, is constitutive of the group to which it belongs. It has both individual and universal reference. The individual is known in the εἶδος, which is also the first universal in which by analysis higher universals are discoverable. These are predicates of the object known, ways of knowing it, rather than the object itself. The suggested solution removes certain difficulties, but scarcely all. On seeing Callias my perception is of man, not Callias, or even man-Callias. The recognition of the individual is a matter of his accidents, to which even sex belongs, and the gap from lowest universal to individual may still be conceived as unbridged. It is in induction, which claims to start from particulars and end in universals,[77] that we must, if anywhere within the confines of logical inquiry, expect to find the required bridge. The Aristotelian conception of induction, however, is somewhat ambiguous. He had abandoned for the most part Conclusions as to induction. the Platonic sense of the corresponding verb, viz. to lead forward to the as yet unknown, and his substitute is not quite clear. It is scarcely the military metaphor. The adducing of a witness for which he uses the verb[78] is not an idea that covers all the uses.[79] Perhaps confrontation with facts is the general meaning. But how does he conceive of its operation? There is in the first place the action of the psychological mechanism in the process from discriminative sense upwards wherein we realize “first” universals.[80] This is clearly an unreflective, prelogical process, not altogether lighted up by our retrojection upon it of our view of dialectical induction based thereon. The immanent rationality of this first form, in virtue of which at the stage when intelligence acts freely on the occasion of the datum supplied it recognizes continuity with its own self-conscious process, is what gives the dialectical type its meaning. Secondly we have this dialectical “induction as to particulars by grouping of similars”[81] whose liability to rebuttal by an exception has been already noted in connexion with the limits of dialectic. This is the incomplete induction by simple enumeration which has so often been laughed to scorn. It is a heuristic process liable to failure, and its application by a nation of talkers even to physics where non-expert opinion is worthless somewhat discredited it. Yet it was the fundamental form of induction as it was conceived throughout the scholastic period. Thirdly we have the limiting cases of this in the inductive syllogism διὰ πάντων,[82] a syllogism in the third figure concluding universally, and yet valid because the copula expresses equivalence, and in analogy[83] in which, it has been well said, instances are weighed and not counted. In the former it has been noted[84] that Aristotle’s illustration does not combine particular facts into a lowest concept, but specific concepts into a generic concept, and[85] that in the construction of definite inductions the ruling thought with Aristotle is already, though vaguely, that of causal relation. It appears safer, notwithstanding, to take the less subtle interpretation[86] that dialectical induction struggling with instances is formally justified only at the limit, and that this, where we have exhausted and know that we have exhausted the cases, is in regard to individual subjects rarely and accidentally reached, so that we perforce illustrate rather from the definite class-concepts falling under a higher notion. After all, Aristotle must have had means by which he reached the conclusions that horses are long-lived and lack gall. It is only then in the rather mystical relation of νοῦς to the first type of induction as the process of the psychological mechanism that an indication of the direction in which the bridge from individual being to universal knowledge is to be found can be held to lie.
Enough has been said to justify the great place assigned to Aristotle in the history of logic. Without pressing metaphysical formulae in logic proper, he analysed formal implication grounded implication as a mode of knowledge in the rationality of the real, and developed a justificatory Summary. metaphysic. He laid down the programme which the after history of logic was to carry out. We have of course abandoned particular logical positions. This is especially to be noted in the theory of the proposition. The individualism with which he starts, howsoever afterwards mitigated by his doctrine of τὸ τὶ ἦν εἰναι or εἶδος constituting the individual in a system of intelligible relations, confined him in an inadmissible way to the subject-attribute formula. He could not recognize such vocables as the impersonals for what they were, and had perforce to ignore the logical significance of purely reciprocal judgments, such as those of equality. There was necessarily a “sense” or direction in every proposition, with more than the purely psychological import that the advance was from the already mastered and familiar taken as relatively stable, to the new and strange. Many attributes, too, were predicable, even to the end, in an external and accidental way, not being derivable from the essence of the subject. The thought of contingency was too easily applied to these attributes, and an unsatisfactory treatment of modality followed. It is indeed the doctrine of the intractability of matter to form that lies at the base of the paradox as to the disparateness of knowledge and the real already noted. On the one hand Aristotle by his doctrine of matter admitted a surd into his system. On the other, he assigned to νοῦς with its insight into rationality too high a function with regard to the concrete in which the surd was present, a power to certify the truth of scientific principles. The example of Aristotle’s view of celestial physics as a science of pure forms exhibits both points. On the Copernican change the heavenly bodies were recognized as concrete and yet subject to calculable law. Intelligence had warranted false principles. The moral is that of the story of the heel of Achilles.
To return to logic proper. The Aristotelian theory of the universal of science as secure from dependence on its instances and the theory of linking in syllogism remain a heritage for all later logic, whether accepted in precisely Aristotle’s formula or no. It is because the intervening centuries had the Aristotelian basis to work on, sometimes in reduced quantity and corrupt form, but always in some quantity and some form, that the rest of our logical tradition is what it is. We stand upon his shoulders.
iii. Later Greek Logic.
After Aristotle we have, as regards logic, what the verdict of after times has rightly characterized as an age of Epigoni. So far as the Aristotelian framework is accepted we meet only minor corrections and extensions of a formal kind. If there is conscious and purposed divergence from Aristotle, inquiry moves, on the whole, within the circle of ideas where Aristotelianism had fought its fight and won its victory. Where new conceptions emerge, the imperfection of the instruments, mechanical and methodological, of the sciences renders them unfruitful, until their rediscovery in a later age. We have activity without advance, diversity without development. Attempts at comprehensiveness end in the compromises of eclecticism.
Illustrations are not far to seek. Theophrastus and in general the elder Peripatetics, before the rise of new schools with new lines of cleavage and new interests had led to new antagonisms and new alliances, do not break away from the Aristotelian metaphysic. Their interests, however, lie in the sublunary The Peripatetics. sciences in which the substantive achievement of the school was to be found. With Theophrastus, accordingly, in his botanical inquiries, for example, the alternatives of classification, the normal sequence of such and such a character upon such another, the conclusion of rational probability, are what counts. It is perhaps not wholly fanciful to connect with this attitude the fact that Aristotle’s pupils dealt with a surer hand than the master with the conclusions from premises of unlike modality, and that a formal advance of some significance attributable to Theophrastus and Eudemus is the doctrine of the hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms.
The Stoics are of more importance. Despite the fact that their philosophic interests lay rather in ethics and physics, their activity in what they classified as the third department of speculation was enormous and has at least left ineffaceable traces on the terminology of philosophy. Logic is their The Stoics. word, and consciousness, impression and other technical words come to us, at least as technical words, from Roman Stoicism. Even inference, though apparently not a classical word, throws back to the Stoic name for a conclusion.[87] In the second place, it is in the form in which it was raised in connexion with the individualistic theory of perception with which the Stoics started, that one question of fundamental importance, viz. that of the criterion of truth, exercised its influence on the individualists of the Renaissance. Perception, in the view of the Stoics, at its highest both revealed and guaranteed the being of its object. Its hold upon the object involved the discernment that it could but be that which it purported to be. Such “psychological certainty” was denied by their agnostic opponents, and in the history of Stoicism we have apparently a modification of the doctrine of φαντασία καταληπτικὴ with a view to meet the critics, an approximation to a recognition that the primary conviction might meet with a counter-conviction, and must then persist undissipated in face of the challenge and in the last resort find verification in the haphazard instance, under varying conditions, in actual working. The controversy as to the self-evidence of perception in which the New Academy effected some sort of conversion of the younger Stoics, and in which the Sceptics opposed both, is one of the really vital issues of the decadence.
Another doctrine of the Stoics which has interest in the light of certain modern developments is their insistence on the place of the λεκτόν in knowledge. Distinct alike from thing and mental happening, it seems to correspond to “meaning” as it is used as a technical phrase now-a-days. This anticipation was apparently sterile. Along the same lines is their use of the hypothetical form for the universal judgment, and their treatment of the hypothetical form as the typical form of inference.
The Stoical categories, too, have an historical significance. They are apparently offered in place of those of Aristotle, an acquaintance with whose distinctions they clearly presume. Recognizing a linguistic side to “logical” theory with a natural development in rhetoric, the Stoics endeavour to exorcise considerations of language from the contrasted side. They offer pure categories arising in series, each successive one presupposing those that have gone before. Yet the substance, quality, condition absolute (πῶς ἔχον) and condition relative of Stoicism have no enduring influence outside the school, though they recur with eclectics like Galen. The Stoics were too “scholastic” in their speculations.
In Epicureanism logic is still less in honour. The practical end, freedom from the bondage of things with the peace it brings, is all in all, and even scientific inquiry is only in place as a means to this end. Of the apparatus of method the less the better. We are in the presence of a necessary evil. Epicureans. Yet, in falling back, with a difference, upon the atomism of Democritus, Epicurus had to face some questions of logic. In the inference from phenomena to further phenomena positive verification must be insisted on. In the inference from phenomena to their non-phenomenal causes, the atoms with their inaccessibility to sense, a different canon of validity obtains, that of non-contradiction.[88] He distinguishes too between the inference to combination of atoms as universal cause, and inference to special causes beyond the range of sense. In the latter case alternatives may be acquiesced in.[89] The practical aim of science is as well achieved if we set forth possible causes as in showing the actual cause. This pococurantism might easily be interpreted as an insight into the limitations of inverse method as such or as a belief in the plurality of causes in Mill’s sense of the phrase. More probably it reflects the fact that Epicurus was, according to tradition through Nausiphanes, on the whole dominated by the influences that produced Pyrrhonism. Democritean physics without a calculus had necessarily proved sterile of determinate concrete results, and this was more than enough to ripen the naturalism of the utilitarian school into scepticism. Some reading between the lines of Lucretius has led the “logic” of Epicurus to have an effect on the modern world, but scarcely because of its deserts.
The school of Pyrrho has exercised a more legitimate influence. Many of the arguments by which the Sceptics enforced their advocacy of a suspense of judgment are antiquated in type, but many also are, within the limits of the individualistic theory of knowledge, quite unanswerable. Hume had The Sceptics. constant recourse to this armoury. The major premise of syllogism, says the Pyrrhonist, is established inductively from the particular instances. If there be but one of these uncovered by the generalization, this cannot be sound. If the crocodile moves its upper, not its lower, jaw, we may not say that all animals move the lower jaw. The conclusion then is really used to establish the major premise, and if we still will infer it therefrom we fall into the circular proof.[90] Could Mill say more? But again. The inductive enumeration is either of all cases or of some only. The former is in an indeterminate or infinite subject-matter impossible. The latter is invalid.[91] Less familiar to modern ears is the contention that proof needs a standard or criterion, while this standard or criterion in turn needs proof. Or still more the dialectical device by which the sceptic claims to escape the riposte that his very argument presumes the validity of this or that principle, viz. the doctrine of the equipollence of counter-arguments. Of course the counter-contention is no less valid! So too when the reflection is made that scepticism is after all a medicine that purges out itself with the disease, the disciple of Pyrrho and Aenesidemus bows and says, Precisely! The sceptical suspension of judgment has its limits, however. The Pyrrhonist will act upon a basis of probabilities. Nay, he even treats the idea of cause[92] as probable enough so long as nothing more than action upon expectation is in question. He adds, however, that any attempt to establish it is involved in some sort of dilemma. That, for instance, cause as the correlate of effect only exists with it, and accordingly, cause which is come while effect is still to come is inconceivable.[93] From the subjectivist point of view, which is manifestly fundamental through most of this, such arguments suasory of the Pyrrhonist suspense of judgment (ἐποχή) are indeed hard to answer. It is natural, then, that the central contribution of the Sceptics to the knowledge controversy lies in the modes (τρόποι) in which the relativity of phenomena is made good, that these are elaborated with extreme care, and that they have a modern ring and are full of instruction even to-day. Scepticism, it must be confessed, was at the least well equipped to expose the bankruptcy of the post-Aristotelian dogmatism.
It was only gradually that the Sceptic’s art of fence was developed. From the time of Pyrrho overlapping Aristotle himself, who seems to have been well content to use the feints of more than one school among his predecessors, while showing that none of them could claim to get past his guard, down through a period in which the decadent academy under Carneades, otherwise dogmatic in its negations, supplied new thrusts and parries, to Aenesidemus in the late Ciceronian age, and again to Sextus Empiricus, there seems to have been something of plasticity and continuous progress. In this matter the dogmatic schools offer a marked contrast. In especial it is an outstanding characteristic of the younger rivals to Aristotelianism that as they sprang up suddenly into being to contest the claims of the Aristotelian system in the moment of its triumph, so they reached maturity very suddenly, and thereafter persisted for the most part in a stereotyped tradition, modified only when convicted of indefensible weakness. The 3rd century B.C. saw in its first half the close of Epicurus’ activity, and the life-work of Chrysippus, the refounder of Stoicism, is complete before its close. And subsequent variations seem to have been of a negligible where not of an eclectic character. In the case of Epicureanism we can happily judge of the tyranny of the literal tradition by a comparison of Lucretius with the recorded doctrine of the master. But the rule apparently obtains throughout that stereotype and compromise offer themselves as the exhaustive alternative. This is perhaps fortunate for the history of doctrine, for it produces the commentator, your Aspasius or Alexander of Aphrodisias, and the substitute for the critic, your Cicero, or your Galen with his attempt at comprehension of the Stoic categories and the like while starting from Aristotelianism. Cicero in particular is important as showing the effect or philosophical eclecticism upon Roman cultivation, and as the often author and always popularizer of the Latin terminology of philosophy.
The cause of the stereotyping of the systems, apart from political conditions, seems to have been the barrenness of science. Logic and theory of knowledge go together, and without living science, theory of knowledge loses touch with life, and logic becomes a perfunctory thing. Under such circumstances speculative interest fritters itself and sooner or later the sceptic has his way. Plato is full of the faith of mathematical physics. Aristotle is optimistic of achievement over the whole range of the sciences. But the divorce of science of nature from mathematics, the failure of biological inquiry to reach so elementary a conception as that of the nerves, the absence of chemistry from the circle of the sciences, disappointed the promise of the dawn and the relative achievement of the noon-day. There is no development. Physical science remains dialectical, and a physical experiment is as rare in the age of Lucretius as in that of Empedocles. The cause of eclecticism is the unsatisfying character of the creeds of such science, in conjunction with the familiar law that, in triangular or plusquam-triangular controversies a common hatred will produce an alliance based on compromise. A bastard Platonism through hostility to Stoicism may become agnostic. Stoicism through hostility to its sceptical critics may prefer to accept some of the positions of the dogmatic nihilist.
Of the later schools the last to arise was Neoplatonism. The mathematical sciences, at least, had not proved disappointing. For those of the school of Plato who refused the apostasy of the new academy, there was hope either in the mathematical side of the Pythagoreo-Platonic tradition, or in Neoplatonism. its ritual and theological side. Neoplatonism is philosophy become theosophy, or it is the sermon on the text that God geometrizes. It is of significance in the general history of thought as the one great school that developed after the decadence had set in. In its metaphysic it showed no failure in dialectical constructiveness. In the history of logic it is of importance because of its production of a whole series of commentators on the Aristotelian logic. Not only the Introduction of Porphyry, which had lasting effects on the Scholastic tradition, but the commentaries of Themistius, and Simplicius. It was the acceptance of the Aristotelian logic by Neoplatonism that determined the Aristotelian complexion of the logic of the next age. If Alexander is responsible for such doctrines as that of the intellectus acquisitus, it is to Porphyry, with his characteristically Platonist preference for the doctrine of universals, and for classification, that we owe the scholastic preoccupation with the realist controversy, and with the quinque voces, i.e. the Aristotelian predicables as restated by Porphyry.
B. Scholasticism
The living force in the spiritual life of the Roman empire was, after all, not philosophy, but religion, and specifically Christianity. With the extension of Christianity to the Gentile world it at length became necessary for it to orientate itself towards what was best in Greek culture. There is a Stoic element in the ethic of the Pauline epistles, but the theological affinity that the Johannine gospel, with its background of philosophic ideas, exhibits to Platonic and Neoplatonist teaching caused the effort at absorption to be directed rather in that direction. Neoplatonism had accepted the Aristotelian logic with its sharper definition than anything handed down from Plato, and, except the logic of the Sceptics, there was no longer any rival discipline of the like prestige. The logic of the Stoics had been discredited by the sceptical onset, but in any case there was no organon of a fitness even comparable to Aristotle’s for the task of drawing out the implications of dogmatic premises. Aristotelian logic secured the imprimatur of the revived Platonism, and it was primarily because of this that it passed into the service of Christian theology. The contact of the Church with Platonism was on the mystical side. Orthodoxy needed to counter heretical logic not with mysticism, itself the fruitful mother of heresies, but with argument. Aristotelianism approved itself as the controversial instrument, and in due course held the field alone. The upshot is what is called Scholasticism. Scholasticism is the Aristotelianism of medieval orthodoxy as taught in the “schools” or universities of Western Europe. It takes form as a body of doctrine drawing its premises from authority, sometimes in secular matters from that of Aristotle, but normally from that of the documents and traditions of systematic theology, while its method it draws from Aristotle, as known in the Latin versions,[94] mainly by Boethius, of some few treatises of the Organon together with the Isagoge of Porphyry. It dominates the centres of intellectual life in the West because, despite its claim to finality in its principles or premises, and to universality for its method, it represents the only culture of a philosophic kind available to the adolescent peoples of the Western nations just becoming conscious of their ignorance. Christianity was the one organizing principle that pulsed with spiritual life. The vocation of the student could find fulfilment only in the religious orders. Scholasticism embodied what the Christian community had saved from the wreckage of Greek dialectic. Yet with all its effective manipulation of the formal technique of its translated and mutilated Aristotle, Scholasticism would have gone under long before it did through the weakness intrinsic to its divorce of the form and the matter of knowledge, but for two reasons. The first is the filtering through of some science and some new Aristotelian learning from the Arabs. The second is the spread of Greek scholarship and Greek manuscripts westward, which was consequent on the Latin occupation of Constantinople in 1204. It was respited by the opportunity which was afforded it of fresh draughts from the Aristotle of a less partial and purer tradition, and we have, accordingly, a golden age of revived Scholasticism beginning in the 13th century, admitting now within itself more differences than before. It is to the schoolmen of the two centuries preceding the Turkish capture of Constantinople that the controversial refinements usually associated with the name of Scholasticism are attributable. The Analytics of Aristotle now entered quite definitely into the logical thought of Scholasticism and we have the contrast of a logica vetus and logica nova. That other matters, the parva logicalia and Mnemonics adapted from Psellus and possibly of Stoic origin, entered too did not outweigh this advantage. Confrontation with the historical Aristotle may have brought but little comfort to the orthodox system, but it was a stimulus to dialectical activity within the schools. It provoked the distinction of what was true secundum fidem and what was true secundum rationem among even sincere champions of orthodoxy, and their opponents accepted with a smile so admirable a mask for that thinking for themselves to which the revival of hope of progress had spurred them. The pioneers of the Renaissance owe something of their strength to their training in the developments which the system that they overthrew underwent during this period. The respite, however, was short. The flight of Byzantine scholarship westward in the 15th century revealed, and finally, that the philosophic content of the Scholastic teaching was as alien from Aristotle as from the spirit of the contemporary revolt of science, with its cry for a new medicine, a new nautical astronomy and the like. The doom of the Scholastic Aristotle was nevertheless not the rehabilitation of the Greek Aristotle. Between him and the tide of feeling at the Renaissance lay the whole achievement of Arab science. That impatience of authority to which we owe the Renaissance, the Reformation and the birth of Nationalism, is not stilled by the downfall of Aristotle as the nomen appellativum of the schools. The appeal is to experience, somewhat vaguely defined, as against all authority, to the book of nature and no other. At last the world undertakes to enlarge the circle of its ideas.
C. The Renaissance
Accordingly what is in one sense the revival of classical learning is in another a recourse to what inspired that learning, and so is a new beginning. There is no place for a reformed Aristotelian logic, though the genius of Zabarella was there to attempt it. Nor for revivals of the competing systems, though all have their advocates. Scientific discovery was in the air. The tradition of the old world was too heavily weighted with the Ptolemaic astronomy and the like to be regarded as other than a bar to progress. But from the new point of view its method was inadequate too, its contentment with an induction that merely leaves an opponent silent, when experiment and the application of a calculus were within the possibilities. The transformation of logic lay with the man of science, hindered though he might be by the enthusiasm of some of the philosophers of nature. Henceforth the Aristotelian logic, the genuine no less than the traditional, was to lie on the other side of the Copernican change.
The demand is for a new organon, a scientific method which shall face the facts of experience and justify itself by its achievement in the reduction of them to control. It is a notable feature of the new movement, that except verbally, in a certain licence of nominalist expression, due to the swing of the pendulum away from the realist doctrine of universals, there is little that we can characterize as Empiricism. Facts are opposed to abstract universals. Yes. Particulars to controlling formulae. No. Experience is appealed to as fruitful where the formal employment of syllogism is barren. But it is not mere induction, with its “unanalysed concretes taken as ultimate” that is set up as the substitute for deduction. Rather a scientific process, which as experiential may be called inductive, but which is in other regards deductive as syllogism, is set up in contrast to syllogism and enumeration alike. This is to be seen in Zabarella,[95] in Galilei,[96] and in Bacon. The reformed Aristotelian logic of the first-named with its inductio demonstrativa, the mathematico-physical analysis followed by synthesis of the second, the exclusiva, or method of exclusions of the last, agree at least in this, that the method of science is one and indivisible, while containing both an inductive and a deductive moment. That what, e.g., Bacon says of his method may run counter to this is an accident of the tradition of the quarrel with realism. So, too, with the scholastic universals. Aristotle’s forms had been correlated, though inadequately, with the idea of function. Divorced from this they are fairly stigmatized as mental figments or branded as ghostly entities that can but block the path. But consider Bacon’s own doctrine of forms. Or watch the mathematical physicist with his formulae. The faith of science looks outward as in the dawn of Greek philosophy, and subjectivism such as Hume’s has as yet no hold. Bacon summing up the movement so far as he understood it, in a rather belated way, has no theory of knowledge beyond the metaphor of the mirror held up to nature. Yet he offers an ambitious logic of science, and the case is typical.
The science of the Renaissance differs from that of the false dawn in Greek times in the fact of fruitfulness. It had the achievement of the old world in the field of mathematics upon which to build. It was in reaction against a dialectic and not immediately to be again entrapped. In Galilei. scientific method, then, it could but advance, provided physics and mathematics did not again fail of accord. Kepler and Galilei secured it against that disaster. The ubi materia ibi geometria of the one is the battle-cry of the mathematico-physical advance. The scientific instrument of the other, with its moments of analysis and construction, metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo, engineers the road for the advance. The new method of physics is verifiable by its fruitfulness, and so free of any immediate danger from dialectic. Its germinal thought may not have been new, but, if not new, it had at least needed rediscovery from the beginning. For it was to be at once certain and experiential. A mathematico-physical calculus that would work was in question. The epistemological problem as such was out of the purview. The relation of physical laws to the mind that thought them was for the time a negligible constant. When Descartes, having faithfully and successfully followed the mathematico-physical inquiry of his more strictly scientific predecessors, found himself compelled to raise the question how it was possible for him to know what in truth he seemed to know so certainly, the problem entered on a new phase. The scientific movement had happily been content for the time with a half which, then and there at least, was more than the whole.
Bacon was no mathematician, and so was out of touch with the main army of progress. By temperament he was rather with the Humanists. He was content to voice the cry for the overthrow of the dominant system as such, and to call for a new beginning, with no realist presuppositions. Bacon. He is with the nominalists of the later Scholasticism and the naturalists of the early Renaissance. He echoes the cry for recourse to nature, for induction, for experiment. He calls for a logic of discovery. But at first sight there is little sign of any greater contribution to the reconstruction than is to be found in Ramus or many another dead thinker. The syllogism is ineffective, belonging to argumentation, and constraining assent where what we want is control of things. It is a mechanical combination of propositions as these of terms which are counters to express concepts often ill-defined. The flight from a cursory survey of facts to wide so-called principles must give way to a gradual progress upward from propositions of minimum to those of medium generality, and in these consists the fruitfulness of science. Yet the induction of the Aristotelians, the dialectical induction of the Topics, content with imperfect enumeration and with showing the burden of disproof upon the critic, is puerile, and at the mercy of a single instance to the contrary. In all this there is but little promise for a new organon. It is neither novel nor instrumental. On a sudden Bacon’s conception of a new method begins to unfold itself. It is inductive only in the sense that it is identical in purpose with the ascent from particulars. It were better called exclusiva or elimination of the alternative, which Bacon proposes to achieve, and thereby guarantee his conclusion against the possibility of instance to the contrary.
Bacon’s method begins with a digest into three tables of the facts relevant to any inquiry. The first contains cases of the occurrence of the quality under investigation, colour, e.g., or heat, in varying combinations. The second notes its absence in combinations so allied to certain of these that its presence His three Methods. might fairly have been looked for. The third registers its quantitative variation according to quantitative changes in its concomitants. The method now proceeds on the basis of the first table to set forth the possible suggestions as to a general explanatory formula for the quality in question. In virtue of the remaining tables it rejects any suggestion qualitatively or quantitatively inadequate. If one suggestion, and one alone, survives the process of attempted rejection it is the explanatory formula required. If none, we must begin afresh. If more than one, recourse is to be had to certain devices of method, in the enumeration of which the methods of agreement, difference and concomitant variations[97] find a place, beside the crucial experiment, the glaring instance and the like. An appeal, however, to such devices, though a permissible “first vintage” is relatively an imperfection of method, and a proof that the tables need revision. The positive procedure by hypothesis and verification is rejected by Bacon, who thinks of hypothesis as the will o’ the wisp of science, and prefers the cumbrous machinery of negative reasoning.
Historically he appears to have been under the dominance of the Platonic metaphor of an alphabet of nature, with a consequent belief in the relatively small number of ultimate principles to be determined, and of Plato’s conception of Division, cleared of its dialectical associations and used experientially in application to his own molecular physics. True it is that the rejection of all the cospecies is a long process, but what if therein their simultaneous or subsequent determination is helped forward? They, too, must fall to be determined sometime, and the ideal of science is fully to determine all the species of the genus. This will need co-operative effort as described in the account of Solomon’s House in the New Atlantis.[98] But once introduce the conception of division of labour as between the collector of data on the one hand and the expert of method, the interpreter of nature at headquarters, on the other, and Bacon’s attitude to hypothesis and to negative reasoning is at least in part explained. The hypothesis of the collector, the man who keeps a rain-gauge, or the missionary among savages, is to be discounted from as a source of error. The expert on the other hand may be supposed, in the case of facts over which he has not himself brooded in the course of their acquisition, to approach them without any presumption this way or that. He will, too, have no interest in the isolation of any one of several co-ordinate inquiries. That Bacon underestimates the importance of selective and of provisional explanatory hypotheses even in such fields as that of chemistry, and that technically he is open to some criticism from the point of view that negative judgment is derivate as necessarily resting on positive presuppositions, may be true enough. It seems, however, no less true that the greatness of his conception of organized common effort in science has but rarely met with due appreciation.
In his doctrine of forms, too, the “universals” of his logic, Bacon must at least be held to have been on a path which led forward and not back. His forms are principles whose function falls entirely within knowledge. They are formulae for the control of the activities and the production of the qualities of bodies. Forms. Forms are qualities and activities expressed in terms of the ultimates of nature, i.e. normally in terms of collocations of matter or modes of motion. (The human soul is still an exception.) Form is bound up with the molecular structure and change of structure of a body, one of whose qualities or activities it expresses in wider relations. A mode of motion, for instance, of a certain definite kind, is the form of heat. It is the recipe for, and at the same time is, heat, much as H2O is the formula for and is water. Had Bacon analysed bodies into their elements, instead of their qualities and ways of behaviour, he would have been the logician of the chemical formula. Here, too, he has scarcely received his meed of appreciation.
His influence on his successors has rather lain in the general stimulus of his enthusiasm for experience, or in the success with which he represents the cause of nominalism and in certain special devices of method handed down till, through Hume or Herschel, they affected the thought of Mill. For the rest he was too Aristotelian, if we take the word broadly enough, or, as the result of his Cambridge studies, too Ramist,[99] when the interest in scholastic issues was fading, to bring his original ideas to a successful market.
Bacon’s Logic, then, like Galilei’s, intended as a contribution to scientific method, a systematization of discovery by which, given the fact of knowledge, new items of knowledge may be acquired, failed to convince contemporaries and successors alike of its efficiency as an instrument. It was an ideal that failed to embody itself and justify itself by its fruits. It was otherwise with the mathematical instrument of Galilei.
Descartes stands in the following of Galilei. It is concurrently with signal success in the work of a pioneer in the mathematical advance that he comes to reflect on method, generalizes the method of mathematics to embrace knowledge as a whole, and raises the ultimate issues of its presuppositions. Descartes. In the mathematics we determine complex problems by a construction link by link from axioms and simple data clearly and distinctly conceived. Three moments are involved. The first is an induction, i.e. an exhaustive enumeration of the simple elements in the complex phenomenon under investigation. This resolution or analysis into simple, because clear and distinct, elements may be brought to a standstill again and again by obscurity and indistinctness, but patient and repeated revision of all that is included in the problem should bring the analytic process to fruition. It is impatience, a perversity of will, that is the cause of error. Upon the analysis there results intuition of the simple data. With Descartes intuition does not connote givenness, but its objects are evident at a glance when induction has brought them to light. Lastly we have deduction the determination of the most complex phenomena by a continuous synthesis or combination of the simple elements. Synthesis is demonstrative and complete. It is in virtue of this view of derived or mediate knowledge that Descartes speaks of the (subsumptive) syllogism as “of avail rather in the communication of what we already know.” Syllogism is not the synthesis which together with analysis goes to constitute the new instrument of science. The celebrated Regulae of Descartes are precepts directed to the achievement of the new methodological ideal in any and every subject matter, however reluctant.
It is the paradox involved in the function of intuition, the acceptance of the psychological characters of clearness and distinctness as warranty of a truth presumed to be trans-subjective, that leads to Descartes’s distinctive contribution to the theory of knowledge. In order to lay bare the ground of certainty he raises the universal doubt, and, although, following Augustine,[100] he finds its limit in the thought of the doubter, this of itself is not enough. Cogito, ergo sum. That I think may be admitted. What I think may still need validation. Descartes’s guarantee of the validity of my clear and distinct perceptions is the veracity of God.[101] Does the existence of God in turn call for proof? An effect cannot contain more than its cause, nor the idea of a perfect Being find adequate source save in the actuality of such a Being. Thus the intuition of the casual axiom is used to prove the existence of that which alone gives validity to intuitions. Though the logical method of Descartes has a great and enduring influence, it is the dualism and the need of God to bridge it, the doctrine of “innate” ideas, i.e. of ideas not due to external causes nor to volition but only to our capacity to think, our disposition to develop them, and finally the ontological proof, that affect the thought of the next age most deeply. That essence in the supreme case involves existence is a thought which comes to Spinoza more easily, together with the tradition of the ordo geometricus.
D. Modern Logic
i. The Logic of Empiricism
The path followed by English thought was a different one. Hobbes developed the nominalism which had been the hallmark of revolt against scholastic orthodoxy, and, when he brings this into relation with the analysis and synthesis of scientific method, it is at the expense of the latter.[102] Locke, when Cartesianism had raised the problem of the contents of consciousness, and the spirit of Baconian positivism could not accept of anything that bore the ill-omened name of innate ideas, elaborated a theory of knowledge which is psychological in the sense that its problem is how the simple data with which the individual is in contact in sensation are worked up into a system. Though he makes his bow to mathematical method, he, even more than Hobbes, misses its constructive character. The clue of mathematical certainty is discarded in substance in the English form of “the new way of ideas.”
With Hobbes logic is a calculus of marks and signs in the form of names. Naming is what distinguishes man from the brutes. It enables him to fix fleeting memories and to communicate with his fellows. He alone is capable of truth in the due conjunction or disjunction of names Hobbes. in propositions. Syllogism is simply summation of propositions, its function being communication merely. Analysis is the sole way of invention or discovery. There is more, however, in Hobbes, than the paradox of nominalism. Spinoza could draw upon him for the notion of genetic definition.[103] Leibnitz probably owes to him the thought of a calculus of symbols, and the conception of demonstration as essentially a chain of definitions.[104] His psychological account of syllogism[105] is taken over by Locke. Hume derived from him the explanatory formula of the association of ideas,[106] which is, however, still with Hobbes a fact to be accounted for, not a theory to account for facts, being grounded physically in “coherence of the matter moved.” Finally Mill took from him his definition of cause as sum of conditions,[107] which played no small part in the applied logic of the 19th century.
Locke is of more importance, if not for his logical doctrine, at least for the theory of knowledge from which it flows. With Locke the mind is comparable to white paper on which the world of things records itself in ideas of sensation. Simple ideas of sensation are the only points of contact we have Locke. with things. They are the atomic elements which “the workmanship of the understanding” can thereafter do no more than systematically compound and the like. It is Locke’s initial attribution of the primary rôle in mental process to the simple ideas of sensation that precludes him from the development of the conception of another sort of ideas, or mental contents that he notes, which are produced by reflection on “the operations of our own mind within us.” It is in the latter group that we have the explanation of all that marks Locke as a forerunner of the critical philosophy. It contains in germ a doctrine of categories discovered but not generated in the psychological processes of the individual. Locke, however, fails to “deduce” his categories. He has read Plato’s Theaetetus in the light of Baconian and individualist preconceptions. Reflection remains a sort of “internal sense,” whose ideas are of later origin than those of the external sense. His successors emphasize the sensationist elements, not the workmanship of the mind. When Berkeley has eliminated the literal materialism of Locke’s metaphors of sense-perception, Hume finds no difficulty in accepting the sensations as present virtually in their own right, any nonsensible ground being altogether unknown. From a point of view purely subjectivist he is prepared to explain all that is to be left standing of what Locke ascribes to the workmanship of the mind by the principle of association or customary conjunction of ideas, which Locke had added a chapter to a later edition of his Essay explicitly to reject as an explanatory formula. Condillac goes a step farther, and sees no necessity for the superstructure at all, with its need of explanation valid or invalid. Drawing upon Gassendi for his psychological atomism and upon Hobbes for a thoroughgoing nominalism, he reproduces, as the logical conclusion from Locke’s premises, the position of Antisthenes. The last word is that “une science bien traitée n’est qu’une langue bien faite.”[108]
Locke’s logic comprises, amid much else, a theory of general terms[109] and of definition, a view of syllogism[110] and a declaration as to the possibility of inference from particular to particular,[111] a distinction between propositions which are certain but trifling, and those which add to our knowledge though uncertain, and a doctrine of mathematical certainty.[112] As to the first, “words become general by being made the signs of general ideas, and ideas become general by separating from them” all “that may determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one.” This doctrine has found no acceptance. Not from the point of view for which idea means image. Berkeley, though at length the notions of spirits, acts and relations[113] give him pause, prefers the formula which Hume expresses in the phrase that “some ideas are particular in their nature but general in their representation,”[114] and the after-history of “abstraction” is a discussion of the conditions under which one idea “stands for” a group. Not from those for whom general ideas mean schematic concepts, not imageable. The critic from this side has little difficulty in showing that abstraction of the kind alleged still leave the residuum particular this redness, e.g. not redness. It is, however, of the sorts constituted by the representation which his abstraction makes possible that definition is given, either by enumeration of the simple ideas combined in the significance of the sortal name, or “to save the labour of enumerating,” and “for quickness and despatch sake,” by giving the next wider general name and the proximate difference. We define essences of course in a sense, but the essences of which men talk are abstractions, “creatures of the understanding.” Man determines the sorts or nominal essences, nature the similitudes. The fundamentally enumerative character of the process is clearly not cancelled by the recognition that it is possible to abbreviate it by means of technique. So long as the relation of the nominal to the real essence has no other background than Locke’s doctrine of perception, the conclusion that what Kant afterwards calls analytical judgments a priori and synthetic judgments a posteriori exhaust the field follows inevitably, with its corollary, which Locke himself has the courage to draw, that the natural sciences are in strictness impossible. Mathematical knowledge is not involved in the same condemnation, solely because of the “archetypal” character, which, not without indebtedness to Cumberland, Locke attributes to its ideas. The reality of mathematics, equally with that of the ideals of morals drawn from within, does not extend to the “ectypes” of the outer world. The view of reasoning which Locke enunciates coheres with these views. Reasoning from particular to particular, i.e. without the necessity of a general premise, must be possible, and the possibility finds warranty in a consideration of the psychological order of the terms in syllogism. As to syllogism specifically, Locke in a passage,[115] which has an obviously Cartesian ring, lays down four stages or degrees of reasoning, and points out that syllogism serves us in but one of these, and that not the all-important one of finding the intermediate ideas. He is prepared readily to “own that all right reasoning may be reduced to Aristotle’s forms of syllogism,” yet holds that “a man knows first, and then he is able to prove syllogistically.” The distance from Locke to Stuart Mill along this line of thought is obviously but small.
Apart from the adoption by Hume of the association of ideas as the explanatory formula of the school—it had been allowed by Malebranche within the framework of his mysticism and employed by Berkeley in his theory of vision—there are few fresh notes struck in the logic of sensationalism.Hume. The most notable of these are Berkeley’s treatment of “abstract” ideas and Hume’s change of front as to mathematical certainty. What, however, Hume describes as “all the logic I think proper to employ in my reasoning,” viz. his “rules by which to judge cause and effects,”[116] had, perhaps, farther-reaching historical effects than either. In these the single method of Bacon is already split up into separate modes. We have Mill’s inductive methods in the germ, though with an emphasis quite older than Mill’s. Bacon’s form has already in transmission through Hobbes been transmuted into cause as antecedent in the time series. It may, perhaps, be accounted to Hume for righteousness that he declares—whether consistently or not is another matter—that “the same effect never arises but from the same cause,” and that he still follows Bacon in the conception of absentia in proximo. It is “when in any instance we find our expectation disappointed” that the effect of one of “two resembling objects” will be like that of the other that Hume proposes to apply his method of difference.
No scientific discipline, however, with the doubtful exception of descriptive psychology, stands to gain anything from a temper like that of Hume. The whittling away of its formal or organizing rubrics, as e.g., sameness into likeness, is disconcerting to science wherever the significance of the process is realized. It was because the aftermath of Newtonian science was so rich that the scientific faith of naturalism was able to retain a place besides its epistemological creed that a logician of the school could arise whose spirit was in some sort Baconian, but who, unlike Bacon, had entered the modern world, and faced the problems stated for it by Hume and by Newton.
Stuart Mill’s System of Logic marked a fresh stage in the history of empiricism, for the reason that it made the effort to hold an even balance between the two moments in the thought of the school. Agreement in the use of a common watchword had masked as it seems a real divergence of meaningJ. S. Mill. and purpose. The apostles of inductive method had preached recourse to experience, but had meant thereby nature as a constituted order. They had devised canons for the investigation of the concrete problems of this, but had either ignored altogether the need to give an account of the mirroring mind, or, in the alternative had been, with some naïveté, content to assume that their nominalist friends, consistently their allies in the long struggle with traditionalism, had adequately supplied or could adequately supply the need. The exponents of psychological atomism, on the other hand, with the association of ideas for their one principle of agglutination had come to mean by experience the mental phantasmagoria of the individual. They had undermined the foundations of scientific certainty, and so far as the fecundity of contemporary science did not give them pause, were ready, notwithstanding the difference of their starting-point, to acquiesce in the formula as well as the temper of Pyrrhonism. They could concede the triumphant achievement of science only with the proviso that it must be assumed to fall within the framework of their nominalism. Mill aspired after a doctrine of method such as should satisfy the needs of the natural sciences, notably experimental physics and chemistry as understood in the first half of the 19th century and, mutatis mutandis, of the moral sciences naturalistically construed. In uniting with this the Associationism which he inherited, through his father, from Hume, he revealed at once the strength and weakness of the dual conception of naturalism. His rare thoroughness and rarer candour made it at once unnecessary and impossible that the work should be done again.
If judged by what he denies, viz. the formal logic of Hamilton and Mansel, whose Aristotelian and scholastic learning did but accentuate their traditionalism, and whose acquiescence in consistency constituted in Mill’s view a discouragement of research, such as men now incline to attribute at the least equally to Hume’s idealism, Mill is only negatively justified. If judged by his positive contribution to the theory of method he may claim to find a more than negative justification for his teaching in its success. In the field covered by scholastic logic Mill is frankly associationist. He aims at describing what he finds given, without reference to insensible implications of doubtful validity and value. The upshot is a psychological account of what from one aspect is evidence, from the other, belief. So he explains “concepts or general notions”[117] by an abstraction which he represents as a sort of alt-relief operated by attention and fixed by naming, association with the name giving to a set of attributes a unity they otherwise lack. This is manifestly, when all is said, a particular psychological event, a collective fact of the associative consciousness. It can exercise no organizing or controlling function in knowledge. So again in determining the “import” of propositions, it is no accident that in all save existential propositions it is to the familiar rubrics of associationism—co-existence, sequence, causation and resemblance—that he refers for classification, while his general formula as to the conjunctions of connotations is associationist through and through. It follows consistently enough that inference is from particular to particular. Mill holds even the ideas of mathematics to be hypothetical, and in theory knows nothing of a non-enumerative or non-associative universal. A premise that has the utmost universality consistent with this view can clearly be of no service for the establishment of a proposition that has gone to the making of it. Nor again of one that has not. Its use, then, can only be as a memorandum. It is a shorthand formula of registration. Mill’s view of ratiocinative process clearly stands and falls with the presumed impossibility of establishing the necessity for universals of another type than his, for what may be called principles of construction. His critics incline to press the point that association itself is only intelligible so far as it is seen to depend on universals of the kind that he denies.
In Mill’s inductive logic, the nominalistic convention has, through his tendency to think in relatively watertight compartments,[118] faded somewhat into the background. Normally he thinks of what he calls phenomena no longer as psychological groupings of sensations, as “states of mind,” but as things and events in a physical world howsoever constituted and apprehended. His free use of relating concepts, that of sameness, for instance, bears no impress of his theory of the general notion, and it is possible to put out of sight the fact that, taken in conjunction with his nominalism, it raises the whole issue of the possibility of the equivocal generation of formative principles from the given contents of the individual consciousness, in any manipulation of which they are already implied. Equally, too, the deductive character, apparently in intention as well as in actual fact, of Mill’s experimental methods fails to recall the point of theory that the process is essentially one from particular to particular. The nerve of proof in the processes by which he establishes causal conjunctions of unlimited application is naturally thought to lie in the special canons of the several processes and the axioms of universal and uniform causation which form their background. The conclusions seem not merely to fall within, but to depend on these organic and controlling formulae. They follow not merely according to them but from them. The reference to the rule is not one which may be made and normally is made as a safeguard, but one which must be made, if thought is engaged in a forward and constructive movement at all. Yet Mill’s view of the function of “universal” propositions had been historically suggested by a theory—Dugald Stewart’s—of the use of axioms![119] Once more, it would be possible to forget that Mill’s ultimate laws or axioms are not in his view intuitions, nor forms constitutive of the rational order, nor postulates of all rational construction, were it not that he has made the endeavour to establish them on associationist lines. It is because of the failure of this endeavour to bring the technique of induction within the setting of his Humian psychology of belief that the separation of his contribution to the applied logic of science from his sensationism became necessary, as it happily was easy. Mill’s device rested special inductions of causation upon the laws that every event has a cause, and every cause has always the same effect. It rested these in turn upon a general induction enumerative in character of enormous and practically infinite range and always uncontradicted. Though obviously not exhaustive, the unique extent of this induction was held to render it competent to give practical certainty or psychological necessity. A vicious circle is obviously involved. It is true, of course, that ultimate laws need discovery, that they are discovered in some sense in the medium of the psychological mechanism, and that they are nevertheless the grounds of all specific inferences. But that truth is not what Mill expounds, nor is it capable of development within the limits imposed by the associationist formula.
It is deservedly, nevertheless, that Mill’s applied logic has retained its pride of place amid what has been handed on, if in modified shape, by writers, e.g., Sigwart, and Professor Bosanquet, whose theory of knowledge is quite alien from his. He prescribed regulative or limiting formulae for research as it was actually conducted in his world. His grasp of the procedure by which the man of science manipulated his particular concrete problems was admirable. In especial he showed clear understanding of the functions of hypothesis and verification in the investigations of the solitary worker, with his facts still in course of accumulation and needing to be lighted up by the scientific imagination. He was therefore enabled to formulate the method of what Bacon had tended to despise as merely the “first vintage.” Bacon spent his strength upon a dream of organization for all future discovery. Mill was content to codify. The difference between Bacon and Mill lies chiefly in this, and it is because of this difference that Mill’s contribution, spite of its debt to the Baconian tradition, remains both characteristic and valuable. It is of course possible to criticise even the experimental canons with some severity. The caveats, however, which are relevant within the circle of ideas within which Mill’s lesson can be learned and improved on,[120] seem to admit of being satisfied by relatively slight modifications in detail, or by explanations often supplied or easily to be supplied from points brought out amid the wealth of illustration with which Mill accompanied his formal or systematic exposition of method. The critic has the right of it when he points out, for example, that the practical difficulty in the Method of Agreement is not due to plurality of causes, as Mill states, but rather to intermixture of effects, while, if the canon could be satisfied exactly, the result would not be rendered uncertain in the manner or to the extent which he supposes. Again the formula of the Joint-Method, which contemplates the enumeration of cases “which have nothing in common but the absence of one circumstance,” is ridiculously unsound as it stands. Or, on rather a different line of criticism, the use of corresponding letters in the two series of antecedents and consequents raises, it is said, a false presumption of correlation. Nay, even the use of letters at all suggests that the sort of analysis that actually breaks up its subject-matter is universally or all but universally applicable in nature, and this is not the case. Finally, the conditions of the methods are either realized or not. If they are realized, the work of the scientist falls entirely within the field of the processes preliminary to the satisfaction of the canon. The latter becomes a mere memorandum or formula of registration. So is it possible “to have the enginer hoist with his own petar.” But the conditions are not realized, and in an experiential subject-matter are not realizable. Not one circumstance only in common but “apparently one relevant circumstance only in common” is what we are able to assert. If we add the qualification of relevance we destroy the cogency of the method. If we fail to add it, we destroy the applicability.
The objections turn on two main issues. One is the exaggeration of the possibilities of resolution into separate elements that is due to the acceptance of the postulate of an alphabet of nature. This so soon as noted can be allowed for. It is to the combination of this doctrine with a tendency to think chiefly of experiment, of the controlled addition or subtraction of these elements one at a time, that we owe the theoretically premature linking of a as effect to A as cause. This too can be met by a modification of form. The other issue is perhaps of more significance. It is the oscillation which Mill manifests between the conception of his formula as it is actually applicable to concrete problems in practice, and the conception of it as an expression of a theoretical limit to practical procedure. Mill seems most often to think of the former, while tending to formulate in terms of the latter. At any rate, if relevance in proximo is interpolated in the peccant clause of the canon of the Joint-Method, the practical utility of the method is rehabilitated. So too, if the canon of the Method of Agreement is never more than approximately satisfied, intermixture of effects will in practice mean that we at least often do not know the cause or antecedent equivalent of a given effect, without the possibility of an alternative. Finally, it is on the whole in keeping with Mill’s presuppositions to admit even in the case of the method of difference that in practice it is approximative and instructive, while the theoretical formula, to which it aims at approaching asymptotically as limit, if exact, is in some sense sterile. Mill may well have himself conceived his methods as practically fruitful and normally convincing with the limiting formula in each case more cogent in form but therewith merely the skeleton of the process that but now pulsed with life.
Enough has been said to show why the advance beyond the letter of Mill was inevitable while much in the spirit of Mill must necessarily affect deeply all later experientialism. After Mill experientialism takes essentially new forms. In part because of what Mill had done. In part also because of what he had left undone. After Mill means after Kant and Hegel and Herbart, and it means after the emergence of evolutionary naturalism. Mill, then, marks the final stage in the achievement of a great school of thought.
ii. The Logic of Rationalism.
A fundamental contrast to the school of Bacon and of Locke is afforded by the great systems of reason, owning Cartesian inspiration, which are identified with the names of Spinoza and Leibnitz. In the history of logic the latter thinker is of the more importance. Spinoza’s philosophy is expounded Spinoza. ordine geometrico and with Euclidean cogency from a relatively small number of definitions, axioms and postulates. But how we reach our assurance of the necessity of these principles is not made specifically clear. The invaluable tractate De Intellectus emendatione, in which the agreement with and divergence from Descartes on the question of method could have been fully elucidated, is unhappily not finished. We know that we need to pass from what Spinoza terms experientia vaga,[121] where imagination with its fragmentary apprehension is liable to error and neither necessity nor impossibility can be predicated, right up to that which fictionem terminat—namely, intellectio. And what Spinoza has to say of the requisites of definition and the marks of intellection makes it clear that insight comes with coherence, and that the work of method on the “inductive” side is by means of the unravelling of all that makes for artificial limitation to lay bare what can then be seen to exhibit nexus in the one great system. When all is said, however, the geometric method as universalized in philosophy is rather used by Spinoza than expounded.
With Leibnitz, on the other hand, the logical problem holds the foremost place in philosophical inquiry.[122] From the purely logical thesis, developed at quite an early stage of his thinking,[123] that in any true proposition the predicate is contained in the subject, the main principles of his doctrine of Leibnitz. Monads are derivable with the minimum of help from his philosophy of dynamics. Praedicatum inest subjecto. All valid propositions express in the last resort the relation of predicate or predicates to a subject, and this Leibnitz holds after considering the case of relational propositions where either term may hold the position of grammatical subject, A = B and the like. There is a subject then, or there are subjects which must be recognized as not possible to be predicated, but as absolute. For reasons not purely logical Leibnitz declares for the plurality of such subjects. Each contains all its predicates: and this is true not only in the case of truths of reason, which are necessary, and ultimately to be exhibited as coming under the law of contradiction, “or, what comes to the same thing, that of identity,” but also in the case of truths of fact which are contingent, though a sufficient reason can be given for them which “inclines” without importing necessity. The extreme case of course is the human subject. “The individual notion of each person includes once for all what is to befall it, world without end,” and “it would not have been our Adam but another, if he had had other events.” Existent subjects, containing eternally all their successive predicates in the time-series, are substances, which when the problems connected with their activity, or dynamically speaking their force, have been resolved, demand—and supply—the metaphysic of the Monadology.
Complex truths of reason or essence raise the problem of definition, which consists in their analysis into simpler truths and ultimately into simple—i.e. indefinable ideas, with primary principles of another kind—axioms, and postulates that neither need nor admit of proof. These are identical in the sense that the opposite contains an express contradiction.[124] In the case of non-identical truths, too, there is a priori proof drawn from the notion of the terms, “though it is not always in our power to arrive at this analysis,”[125] so that the question arises, specially in connexion with the possibility of a calculus, whether the contingent is reducible to the necessary or identical at the ideal limit. With much that suggests an affirmative answer, Leibnitz gives the negative. Even in the case of the Divine will, though it be always for the best possible, the sufficient reason will “incline without necessitating.” The propositions which deal with actual existence are still of a unique type, with whatever limitation to the calculus.
Leibnitz’s treatment of the primary principles among truths of reason as identities, and his examples drawn inter alia from the “first principles” of mathematics, influenced Kant by antagonism. Identities some of them manifestly were not. The formula of identity passed in another form to Herbart and therefore to Lotze. In recognizing, further, that the relation of an actual individual fact to its sufficient ground was not reducible to identity, he set a problem diversely treated by Kant and Herbart. He brought existential propositions, indeed, within a rational system through the principle that it must be feasible to assign a sufficient reason for them, but he refused to bring them under the conception of identity or necessity, i.e. to treat their opposites as formally self-contradictory. This bore interest in the Kantian age in the treatment alike of cause and effect, and of the ontological proof of existence from essence. Not that the Law of Sufficient Reason is quite free from equivoque. Propositions concerning the possible existence of individuals put Leibnitz to some shifts, and the difficulty accounts for the close connexion established in regard to our actual world between the law of sufficient reason and the doctrine of the final cause. This connexion is something of an afterthought to distinguish from the potential contingency of the objectively possible the real contingency of the actual, for which the “cause or reason” of Spinoza[126] could not account. The law, however, is not invalidated by these considerations, and with the degree of emphasis and the special setting that Leibnitz gives the law, it is definitely his own.
If we may pass by the doctrine of the Identity of Indiscernibles, which played a part of some importance in subsequent philosophy, and the Law of Continuity, which as Leibnitz represents it is, if not sheer dogma, reached by something very like a fallacy, we have as Leibnitz’s remaining legacy to later logicians the conception of Characteristica Universalis and Ars Combinatoria, a universal denoting by symbols and a calculus working by substitutions and the like. The two positions that a subject contains all its predicates and that all non-contingent propositions—i.e. all propositions not concerned with the existence of individual facts ultimately analyse out into identities—obviously lend themselves to the design of this algebra of thought, though the mathematician in Leibnitz should have been aware that a significant equation is never an identity. Leibnitz, fresh from the battle of the calculus in the mathematical field, and with his conception of logic, at least in some of its aspects, as a generalized mathematic,[127] found a fruitful inspiration, harmonizing well with his own metaphysic, in Bacon’s alphabet of nature. He, too, was prepared to offer a new instrument. That the most important section, the list of forms of combination, was never achieved—this too was after the Baconian example while the mode of symbolization was crude with a = ab and the like—matters little. A new technique of manipulation—it is, of course, no more—had been evolved.
It may be said that among Leibnitz’s successors there is no Leibnitzian. The system as a whole is something too artificial to secure whole-hearted allegiance. Wolff’s formalism is the bastard outcome of the speculation of Leibnitz, and is related to it as remotely as Scholasticism is to Aristotle. Wolff found a sufficient reason for everything and embodied the results of his inquiries in systematic treatises, sometimes in the vernacular. He also, by a transparent petitio principii, brought the law of the sufficient reason under that of non-contradiction. Wolff and his numerous followers account for the charge of dogmatism against “the Leibnitzio-Wolffian school.” They are of importance in the history of logic for two reasons only: they affected strongly the German vocabulary of philosophy and they constituted the intellectual environment in which Kant grew to manhood.
A truer continuator of Leibnitz in the spirit was Herbart.
iii. Kant’s Logic.
Herbart’s admitted allegiance, however, was Kantian with the qualification, at a relatively advanced stage of his thinking, that it was “of the year 1828”—that is, after controversy had brought out implications of Kant’s teaching not wholly contemplated by Kant himself. The critical philosophy had indeed made it impossible to hark back to Leibnitz or any other master otherwise than with a difference.
Yet it is not a single and unambiguous logical movement that derives from Kant. Kant’s lesson was variously understood. Different moments in it were emphasized, with a large diversity of result. As interpreted it was acquiesced in or revolted from and revolt ranged from a desire for some modifications of detail or expression to the call for a radical transformation. Grounds for a variety of developments are to be found in the imperfect harmonization of the rationalistic heritage from the Wolffian tradition which still dominates Kant’s pure general logic with the manifest epistemological intention of his transcendental theory. Or again, within the latter in his admission of a duality of thought and “the given” in knowledge, which within knowledge was apparently irreducible, concurrently with hints as to the possibility, upon a wider view, of the sublation of their disparateness at least hypothetically and speculatively. The sense in which there must be a ground of the unity of the supersensible[128] while yet the transcendent use of Reason—i.e. its use beyond the limits of experience was denied theoretical validity—was not unnaturally regarded as obscure.
Kant’s treatment of technical logic was wholly traditional, and in itself is almost negligible. It is comprised[129] in an early essay on the mistaken subtlety of the syllogistic figures, and a late compilation by a pupil from the introductory matter and running annotations with which the master had enriched his Formal Logic. interleaved lecture-room copy of Meyer’s Compendium of 1752. Wolff’s general logic, “the best,” said Kant, “that we possess,” had been abridged by Baumgarten and the abridgment then subjected to commentation by Meyer. With this traditional body of doctrine Kant was, save for matters of minor detail, quite content. Logic was of necessity formal, dealing as it must with those rules without which no exercise of the understanding would be possible at all. Upon abstraction from all particular methods of thought these rules were to be discerned a priori or without dependence on experience by reflection solely upon the use of the understanding in general. The science of the form of thought abstracted in this way from its matter or content was regarded as of value both as propaedeutic and as canon. It was manifestly one of the disciplines in which a position of finality was attainable. Aristotle might be allowed, indeed, to have omitted no essential point of the understanding. What the moderns had achieved consisted in an advance in accuracy and methodical completeness. “Indeed, we do not require any new discoverers in logic,”[130] said the discoverer of a priori synthesis, “since it contains merely the form of thought.” Applied logic is merely psychology, and not properly to be called logic at all. The technical logic of Kant, then, justifies literally a movement among his successors in favour of a formal conception of logic with the law of contradiction and the doctrine of formal implication for its equipment. Unless the doctrine of Kant’s “transcendental logic” must be held to supply a point of view from which a logical development of quite another kind is inevitable, Kant’s mantle, so far as logic is concerned, must be regarded as having fallen upon the formal logicians.
Kant’s transcendental teaching is summarily as follows: “Transcendental” is his epithet for what is neither empirical—i.e. to be derived from experience—nor yet transcendent—i.e. applicable beyond the limits of experience, the mark of experience being the implication Definition of “Transcen-dental.” of sense or of something which thought contra-distinguishes from its own spontaneous activity as in some sense “the given.” Those features in our organized experience are to be regarded as transcendentally established which are the presuppositions of our having that experience at all. Since they are not empirical they must be structural and belong to “the mind”—i.e. the normal human intelligence, and to like intelligence so far as like. If we set aside such transcendental conditions as belong to sensibility or to the receptive phase of mind and are the presuppositions of juxtaposition of parts, the remainder are ascribable to spontaneity or understanding, to thought with its unifying, organizing or focussing function, and their elucidation is the problem of transcendental analytic. It is still logic, indeed, when we are occupied with the transcendent objects of the discursive faculty as it is employed beyond the limits of experience where it cannot validate its ideas. Such a logic, however, is a dialectic of illusion, perplexed by paralogisms and helpless in the face of antinomies. In transcendental analytic on the other hand we concern ourselves only with the transcendental “deduction” or vindication of the conditions of experience, and we have a logic of cognition in which we may establish our epistemological categories with complete validity. Categories are the forms according to which the combining unity of self-consciousness (synthetic unity of apperception) pluralizes itself through the various functions involved in the constitution of objectivity in different types of the one act of thought, viz. judgment. The clue to the discovery of transcendental conditions Kant finds in the existence of judgments, most manifest in mathematics and in the pure science of nature, which are certain, yet not trifling, necessary and yet not reducible to identities, synthetic therefore and a priori, and so accounted for neither by Locke nor by Leibnitz. “There lies a transcendental condition at the basis of every necessity.”
Kant’s mode of conceiving the activity of thought in the constitution of objects and of their connexion in experience was thought to lie open to an interpretation in conformity with the spirit of his logic, in the sense that the form and the content in knowledge are not merely distinguishable functions Form of Matter of Thought. within an organic whole, but either separable, or at least indifferent one to the other in such a way as to be clearly independent. Thought as form would thus be a factor or an element in a composite unit. It would clearly have its own laws. It would be the whole concern of logic, which, since in it thought has itself for object, would have no reference to the other term of the antithesis, nor properly and immediately to the knowledge which is compact of thought in conjunction with something which, whatever it may be, is prima facie other than thought. There is too much textual warrant for this interpretation of Kant’s meaning. Doubtless there are passages which make against an extreme dualistic interpretation. Even in his “logic” Kant speaks of abstraction from all particular objects of thought rather than of a resolution of concrete thinking into thought and its “other” as separable co-operating factors in a joint product. He spoke throughout, however, as if form and content were mutually indifferent, so that the abstraction of form from content implied nothing of falsification or mutilation. The reserve, therefore, that it was abstraction and not a decomposing that was in question remained to the admirers of his logic quite nugatory. They failed to realize that permissible abstraction from specific contents or methods of knowledge does not obliterate reference to matter or content. They passed easily from the acceptance of a priori forms of thinking to that of forms of a priori thinking, and could plead the example of Kant’s logic.
Kant’s theory of knowledge, then, needed to be pressed to other consequences for logic which were more consonant with the spirit of the Critique. The forms of thought and what gives thought its particular content in concrete acts of thinking could not be regarded as subsisting in a purely external and indifferent relation one to the other. “Laws according to which the subject thinks” and “laws according to which the object is known” cannot be the concern of separate departments of inquiry. As soon divorce the investigation of the shape and material of a mirror from the laws of the incidence of the rays that form images in it, and call it a science of reflection! An important group of writers developed the conception of an adaptation between the two sides of Kant’s antithesis, and made the endeavour to establish some kind of correlation between logical forms and the process of “the given.” There was a tendency to fall back upon the conception of some kind of parallelism, whether it was taken to be interpretative or rather corrective of Kant’s meaning. This device was never remote from the constructions of writers for whom the teaching of Spinoza and Leibnitz was an integral part of their intellectual equipment. Other modes of correlation, however, find favour also, and in some variety. Kant is seldom the sole source of inspiration. His unresolved antithesis[131] is interpreted either diversely or with a difference of emphasis. And the light that later writers bring to bear on Kant’s logic and epistemology from other sides of his speculation varies in kind and in degree.
Another logical movement springs from those whom a correlation of fact within the unity of a system altogether failed to satisfy. There must also be development of the correlated terms from a single principle. Form and content must not only correspond one to the other. They must be exhibited as distinguishable moments within a unity which can at one and the same time be seen to be the ground from which the distinction springs and the ground in virtue of which it is over-ruled. Along this line of speculation we have a logic which claims that whatsoever is in one plane or at one stage in the development of thought a residuum that apparently defies analysis must at another stage and on a higher plane be shown so to be absorbed as to fall altogether within thought. This is the view of Hegel upon which logic comes to coincide with the progressive self-unfolding of thought in that type of metaphysic which is known as absolute, i.e. all-inclusive idealism. The exponent of logic as metaphysic, for whom the rational is the real is necessarily in revolt against all that is characteristically Kantian in the theory of knowledge, against the transcendental method itself and against the doctrine of limits which constitutes the nerve of “criticism.” Stress was to be laid upon the constructive character of the act of thought which Kant had recognized, and without Kant’s qualifications of it. In all else the claim is made to have left the Kantian teaching behind as a cancelled level of speculation.
Transcendental method is indeed not invulnerable. A principle is transcendentally “deduced” when it and only it can explain the validity of some phase of experience, some order of truths. The order of truths, the phase of experience and its certainty had to be taken for granted. The Limitation of Transcenden-tal Method. sense, for example, in which the irreversibility of sequence which is the more known in ordine ad hominem in the case of the causal principle differs from merely psychological conviction is not made fully clear. Even so the inference to the a priori ground of its necessity is, it has been often pointed out, subject to the limitation inherent in any process of reduction, in any regress, that is, from conditionate to condition, viz. that in theory an alternative is still possible. The inferred principle may hold the field as explanation without obvious competitor potential or actual. Nevertheless its claim to be the sole possible explanation can in nowise be validated. It has been established after all by dialectic in the Aristotelian sense of the word. But if transcendental method has no special pride of place, Kant’s conclusion as to the limits of the competence of intellectual faculty falls with it. Cognition manifestly needs the help of Reason even in its theoretical use. Its speculation can no longer be stigmatized as vaticination in vacuo, nor its results as illusory.
Finally, to logic as metaphysic the polar antithesis is psychology as logic. The turn of this also was to come again. If logic were treated as merely formal, the stress of the problem of knowledge fell upon the determination of the processes of the psychological mechanism. If alleged Logic and Psychology. a priori constituents of knowledge—such rubrics as substance, property, relation—come to be explained psychologically, the formal logic that has perforce to ignore all that belongs to psychology is confined within too narrow a range to be able to maintain its place as an independent discipline, and tends to be merged in psychology. This tendency is to be seen in the activity of Fries and Herbart and Beneke, and was actualized as the aftermath of their speculation. It is no accident that it was the psychology of apperception and the voluntaryist theory or practice of Herbart, whose logical theory was so closely allied to that of the formal logicians proper, that contributed most to the development of the post-Kantian psychological logic. Another movement helped also; the exponents of naturalistic evolution were prepared with Spencer to explain the so-called a priori in knowledge as in truth a posteriori, if not to the individual at any rate to the race. It is of course a newer type of psychological logic that is in question, one that is aware of Kant’s “answer to Hume.” Stuart Mill, despite of his relation of antagonism to Hamilton and Mansel, who held themselves to be Kantian in spirit, is still wholly pre-Kantian in his outlook.
Kant’s influence, then, upon subsequent logic is least of all to be measured by his achievement in his professed contribution to technical logic. It may be attributed in some slight degree, perhaps, to incidental flashes of logical insight where his thought is least of what he himself calls logic, Summary. e.g. his exposition of the significance of synthetic judgments a priori, or his explanation of the function of imagery in relation to thought, whereby he offers a solution of the problem of the conditions under which one member of a group unified through a concept can be taken to stand for the rest, or again the way in which he puts his finger on the vital issue in regard to the alleged proof from essence to existence, and illustrations could be multiplied. But much more it belongs to his transformation of the epistemological problem, and to the suggestiveness of his philosophy as a whole for an advance in the direction of a speculative construction which should be able to cancel all Kant’s surds, and in particular vindicate a “ground of the unity of the supersensible which lies back of nature with that which the concept of freedom implies in the sphere of practice,”[132] which is what Kant finally asserts.
iv. After Kant.
Starting from the obvious antithesis of thought and that of which it is the thought, it is possible to view the ultimate relation of its term as that of mutual indifference or, secondly, as that of a correspondence such that while they retain their distinct character modification of the one implies modification of the other, or thirdly and lastly, as that of a mergence of one in the other of such a nature that the merged term, whichever it be, is fully accounted for in a complete theory of that in which it is merged.
The first way is that of the purely formal logicians, of whom Twesten[133] and in England H. L. Mansel may be regarded as typical. They take thought and “the given” as self-contained units which, if not in fact separable, are at any rate susceptible of an abstraction the one from The Formal Logicians. the other so decisive as to constitute an ideal separation. The laws of the pure activity of thought must be independently determined, and since the contribution of thought to knowledge is form they must be formal only. They cannot go beyond the limits of formal consistency or analytic correctness. They are confined to the determination of what the truth of any matter of thought, taken for granted upon grounds psychological or other, which are extraneous to logic, includes or excludes. The unit for logic is the concept taken for granted. The function of logic is to exhibit its formal implications and repulsions. It is questionable whether even this modest task could be really achieved without other reference to the content abstracted from than Mansel, for example, allows. The analogy of the resolution of a chemical compound with its elements which is often on the lips of those who would justify the independence of thought and the real world, with an agnostic conclusion as to non-phenomenal or trans-subjective reality, is not really applicable. The oxygen and hydrogen, for example, into which water may be resolved are not in strictness indifferent one to the other, since both are members of an order regulated according to laws of combination in definite ratios. Or, if applicable, it is double-edged. Suppose oxygen to be found only in water. Were it to become conscious, would it therefore follow that it could infer the laws of a separate or independent activity of its own? Similarly forms of thinking, the law of contradiction not excepted, have their meaning only in reference to determinate content, even though distributively all determinate contents are dispensable. The extreme formalist is guilty of a fallacy of composition in regard to abstraction.
It does not follow, however, that the laws asserted by the formal logicians are invalid or unimportant. There is a permissible abstraction, and in general they practise this, and although they narrow its range unduly, it is legitimately to be applied to certain characters of thinking. As the living organism includes something of mechanism—the skeleton, for example—so an organic logic doubtless includes determinations of formal consistency. The skeleton is meaningless apart from reference to its function in the life of an organism, yet there are laws of skeleton structure which can be studied with most advantage if other characters of the organism are relegated to the background. To allow, however, that abstraction admits of degrees, and that it never obliterates all reference to that from which it is abstracted, is to take a step forward in the direction of the correlation of logical forms with the concrete processes of actual thinking. What was true in formal logic tended to be absorbed in the correlationist theories.
Those formal logicians of the Kantian school, then, may be summarily dismissed, though their undertaking was a necessary one, who failed to raise the epistemological issue at all, or who, raising it, acquiesced in a naïve dualism agnostic of the real world as Kant’s essential lesson. They failed to develop any view which could serve either in fact or in theory as a corrective to the effect of their formalism. What they said with justice was said as well or better elsewhere.
Among them it is on the whole impossible not to include the names of Hamilton and Mansel. The former, while his erudition in respect to the history of philosophical opinion has rarely been equalled, was not a clear thinker. His general theory of knowledge deriving from Kant and Reid, and including among other things a contaminatio of their theories of perception,[134] in no way sustains or mitigates his narrow view of logic. He makes no effective use of his general formula that to think is to condition. He appeals to the direct testimony of consciousness in the sense in which the appeal involves a fallacy. He accepts an ultimate antinomy as to the finiteness or infinity of “the unconditioned,” yet applies the law of the excluded middle to insist that one of the two alternatives must be true, wherefore we must make the choice. And what is to be said of the judgment of a writer who considers the relativity of thought demonstrated by the fact that every judgment unites two members? Hamilton’s significance for the history of logic lies in the stimulus that he gave to the development of symbolic logic in England by his new analytic based upon his discovery or adoption of the principle of the quantification of the predicate. Mansel, too, was learned, specially in matters of Aristotelian exegesis, and much that is of value lies buried in his commentation of the dry bones of the Artis Logicae Rudimenta of Locke’s contemporary Aldrich. And he was a clearer thinker than Hamilton. Formal logic of the extremest rigour is nowhere to be found more adequately expressed in all its strength, and it must be added in all its weakness, than in the writings of Mansel. But if the view maintained above that formal logic must compromise or mitigate its rigour and so fail to maintain its independence, be correct, the logical consistency of Mansel’s logic of consistency does but emphasize its barrenness. It contains no germ for further development. It is the end of a movement.
The brief logic of Herbart[135] is altogether formal too. Logical forms have for him neither psychological nor metaphysical reference, we are concerned in logic solely with the systematic clarification of concepts which are wholly abstract, so that they are not merely not ultimate realities, but also in no Herbart. sense actual moments of our concrete thinking. The first task of logic is to distinguish and group such concepts according to their marks, and from their classification there naturally follows their connexion in judgment. It is in the logic of judgment that Herbart inaugurates a new era. He is not, of course, the first to note that even categorical judgments do not assert the realization of their subject. That is a thought which lies very near the surface for formal logic. He had been preceded too by Maimon in the attempt at a reduction of the traditional types of judgment. He was, however, the first whose analysis was sufficiently convincing to exorcise the tyranny of grammatical forms. The categorical and disjunctive judgment reduce to the hypothetical. By means of the doctrine of the quantification of the predicate, in which with his Leibnitzian conception of identity he anticipated Beneke and Hamilton alike, universal and particular judgments are made to pull together. Modal, impersonal, existential judgments are all accounted for. Only the distinction of affirmative and negative judgments remains unresolved, and the exception is a natural one from the point of view of a philosophy of pluralism. There was little left to be done here save in the way of an inevitable mutatis mutandis, even by Lotze and F. H. Bradley. From the judgment viewed as hypothetical we pass by affirmation of the antecedent or denial of the consequent to inference. This point of departure is noteworthy, as also is the treatment of the inductive syllogism as one in which the middle term is resoluble into a group or series (Reihe). In indicating specifically, too, the case of conclusion from a copulative major premise with a disjunctive minor, Herbart seems to have suggested the cue for Sigwart’s exposition of Bacon’s method of exclusions.
That it was the formal character of Herbart’s logic which was ultimately fatal to its acceptance outside the school as an independent discipline is not to be doubted. It stands, however, on a different footing from that of the formal logic hitherto discussed, and is not to be condemned upon quite the same grounds. In the first place, Herbart is quite aware of the nature of abstraction. In the second, there is no claim that thought at one and the same time imposes form on “the given” and is susceptible of treatment in isolation by logic. With Herbart the forms of common experience, and indeed all that we can regard as his categories, are products of the psychological mechanism and destitute of logical import. And lastly, Herbart’s logic conforms to the exigencies of his system as a whole and the principle of the bare or absolute self-identity of the ultimate “reals” in particular. It is for this reason that it finally lacks real affinity to the “pure logic” of Fries. For at the basis of Herbart’s speculation there lies a conception of identity foreign to the thought of Kant with his stress on synthesis, in his thoroughgoing metaphysical use of which Herbart goes back not merely to Wolff but to Leibnitz. It is no mere coincidence that his treatment of all forms of continuance and even his positive metaphysic of “reals” show affinity to Leibnitz. It was in the pressing to its extreme consequences of the conception of uncompromising identity which is to be found in Leibnitz, that the contradictions took their rise which Herbart aimed at solving, by the method of relations and his doctrine of the ultimate plurality of “reals.” The logic of relations between conceptual units, themselves unaltered by the relation, seems a kind of reflection of his metaphysical method. To those, of course, for whom the only real identity is identity in difference, while identity without difference, like difference without identity, is simply a limit or a vanishing point, Herbart’s logic and metaphysic will alike lack plausibility.
The setting of Herbart’s logic in his thought as a whole might of itself perhaps justify separate treatment. His far-reaching influence in the development of later logic must certainly do so. Directly he affected a school of thought which contained one logician of first-rate importance in Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802–1896), professor at Leipzig. In less direct relation stands Lotze, who, although under other influences he developed a different view even in logic, certainly let no point in the doctrine of his great predecessor at Göttingen escape him. A Herbartian strain is to be met with also in the thought of writers much further afield, for example F. H. Bradley, far though his metaphysic is removed from Herbart’s. Herbart’s influence is surely to be found too in the evolution of what is called Gegenstandstheorie. Nor did he affect the logic of his successors through his logic alone. Reference has been made above to the effect upon the rise of the later psychological logic produced by Herbart’s psychology of apperception, when disengaged from the background of his metaphysic taken in conjunction with his treatment in his practical philosophy of the judgment of value or what he calls the aesthetic judgment. Emerson’s verdict upon a greater thinker—that his was “not a mind to nestle in”—may be true of Herbart, but there can be no doubt as to the stimulating force of this master.
The second way of interpreting the antithesis of thought to what is thought of, was taken by a group of thinkers among whom a central and inspiring figure was Schleiermacher. They in no sense constitute a school and manifest radical differences among themselves. They are Logic as the rationale of knowledge. agreed, however, in the rejection, on the one hand, of the subjectivist logic with its intrinsic implication that knowledge veils rather than reveals the real world, and, on the other hand, of the logic of the speculative construction with its pretension to “deduce,” to determine, and finally at once to cancel and conserve any antithesis in its all-embracing dialectic. They agree, then, in a maintenance of the critical point of view, while all alike recognize the necessity of bringing the thought-function in knowledge into more intimate relation with its “other” than Kant had done, by means of some formula of correlation or parallelism. Such an advance might have taken its cue directly from Kant himself. As an historical fact it tended rather to formulate itself as a reaction towards Kant in view of the course taken by the speculative movement. Thus Schleiermacher’s posthumously published Dialektik (1839) may be characterized as an appeal from the absolutist element in Schelling’s philosophy to the conception of that correlation or parallelism which Schelling had exhibited as flowing from and subsisting within his absolute, and therein as a return upon Schleier-macher. Kant’s doctrine of limits. Schleiermacher’s conception of dialectic is to the effect that it is concerned with the principles of the art of philosophizing, as these are susceptible of a relatively independent treatment by a permissible abstraction. Pure thinking or philosophizing is with a view to philosophy or knowledge as an interconnected system of all sciences or departmental forms of knowledge, the mark of knowledge being its identity for all thinking minds. Dialectic then investigates the nexus which must be held to obtain between all thoughts, but also that agreement with the nexus in being which is the condition of the validity of the thought-nexus. In knowing there are two functions involved, the “organic” or animal function of sensuous experience in virtue of which we are in touch with being, directly in inner perception, mediately in outer experience, and the “intellectual” function of construction. Either is indispensable, though in different departments of knowledge the predominant rôle falls to one or other, e.g. we are more dependent in physics, less so in ethics. The idea of a perfect harmony of thinking and being is a presupposition that underlies all knowing but cannot itself be realized in knowledge. In terms of the agreement of thought and being, the logical forms of the part of dialectic correspondent to knowledge statically considered have parallels and analogies in being, the concept being correlated to substance, the judgment to causal nexus. Inference, curiously enough, falls under the technical side of dialectic concerned with knowledge in process or becoming, a line of cleavage which Ueberweg has rightly characterized as constituting a rift within Schleiermacher’s parallelism.
Schleiermacher’s formula obviously ascribes a function in knowledge to thought as such, and describes in a suggestive manner a duality of the intellectual and organic functions, resting on a parallelism of thought and being whose collapse into identity it is beyond human capacity to grasp. It is rather, however, a statement of a way in which the relations of the terms of the problem may be conceived than a system of necessity. It may indeed be permitted to doubt whether its influence upon subsequent theory would have been a great one apart from the spiritual force of Schleiermacher’s personality. Some sort of correlationist conception, however, was an inevitable development, and the list[136] of those who accepted it in something of the spirit of Schleiermacher is a long one and contains many distinguished names, notably those of Trendelenburg and Ueberweg. The group is loosely constituted however. There was scope for diversity of view and there was diversity of view, according as the vital issue of the formula was held to lie in the relation of intellectual function to organic function or in the not quite equivalent relation of thinking to being. Moreover, few of the writers who, whatsoever it was that they baptized with the name of logic, were at least earnestly engaged in an endeavour to solve the problem of knowledge within a circle of ideas which was on the whole Kantian, were under the dominance of a single inspiration. Beneke’s philosophy is a striking instance of this, with application to Fries and affinity to Herbart conjoined with obligations to Schelling both directly and through Schleiermacher. Lotze again wove together many threads of earlier thought, though the web was assuredly his own. Finally it must not be forgotten that the host of writers who were in reaction against Hegelianism tended to take refuge in some formula of correlation, as a half-way house between that and formalism or psychologism or both, without reference to, and often perhaps without consciousness of, the way in which historically it had taken shape to meet the problem held to have been left unresolved by Kant.
Lotze on the one hand held the Hegelian “deduction” to be untenable, and classed himself with those who in his own phrase “passed to the order of the day,” while on the other hand he definitely raised the question, how an “object” could be brought into forms to which it was not in some sense Lotze. adapted. Accordingly, though he regards logic as formal, its forms come into relation to objectivity in some sort even within the logical field itself, while when taken in the setting of his system as a whole, its formal character is not of a kind that ultimately excludes psychological and metaphysical reference, at least speculatively. As a logician Lotze stands among the masters. His flair for the essentials in his problem, his subtlety of analysis, his patient willingness to return upon a difficulty from a fresh and still a fresh point of view, and finally his fineness of judgment, make his logic[137] so essentially logic of the present, and of its kind not soon to be superseded, that nothing more than an indication of the historical significance of some of its characteristic features need be attempted here.
In Lotze’s pure logic it is the Herbartian element that tends to be disconcerting. Logic is formal. Its unit, the logical concept, is a manipulated product and the process of manipulation may be called abstraction. Processes of the psychological mechanism lie below it. The paradox of the theory of judgment is due to the ideal of identity, and the way in which this is evaded by supplementation to produce a non-judgmental identity, followed by translation of the introduced accessories with conditions in the hypothetical judgment, is thoroughly in Herbart’s manner. The reduction of judgments is on lines already familiar. Syllogism is no instrumental method by which we compose our knowledge, but an ideal to the form of which it should be brought. It is, as it were, a schedule to be filled in, and is connected with the disjunctive judgment as a schematic setting forth of alternatives, not with the hypothetical, and ultimately the apodictic judgment with their suggestion that it is the real movement of thought that is subjected to analysis. Yet the resultant impression left by the whole treatment is not Herbartian. The concept is accounted for in Kantian terms. There is no discontinuity between the pre-logical or sub-logical conversion of impressions into “first universals” and the formation of the logical concept. Abstraction proves to be synthesis with compensatory universal marks in the place of the particular marks abstracted from. Synthesis as the work of thought always supplies, beside the mere conjunction or disjunction of ideas, a ground of their coherence or non-coherence. It is evident that thought, even as dealt with in pure logic, has an objectifying function. Its universals have objective validity, though this does not involve direct real reference. The formal conception of pure logic, then, is modified by Lotze in such a way as not only to be compatible with a view of the structural and functional adequacy of thought to that which at every point at which we take thinking is still distinguishable from thought, but even inevitably to suggest it. That the unit for logic is the concept and not the judgment has proved a stumbling-block to those of Lotze’s critics who are accustomed to think in terms of the act of thought as unit. Lotze’s procedure is, indeed, analogous to the way in which, in his philosophy of nature, he starts from a plurality of real beings, but by means of a reductive movement, an application of Kant’s transcendental method, arrives at the postulate or fact of a law of their reciprocal action which calls for a monistic and idealist interpretation. He starts, that is in logic, with conceptual units apparently self-contained and admitting of nothing but external relation, but proceeds to justify the intrinsic relation between the matter of his units by an appeal to the fact of the coherence of all contents of thought. Indeed, if thought admits irreducible units, what can unite? Yet he is left committed to his puzzle as to a reduction of judgment to identity, which partially vitiates his treatment of the theory of judgment. The outstanding feature of this is, nevertheless, not affected, viz. the attempt that he makes, inspired clearly by Hegel, “to develop the various forms of judgment systematically as members of a series of operations, each of which leaves a part of its problem unmastered and thereby gives rise to the next.”[138] As to inference, finally, the ideal of the articulation of the universe of discourse, as it is for complete knowledge, when its disjunctions have been thoroughly followed out and it is exhaustively determined, carried the day with him against the view that the organon for gaining knowledge is syllogism. The Aristotelian formula is “merely the expression, formally expanded and complete, of the truth already embodied in disjunctive judgment, namely, that every S which is a specific form of M possesses as its predicate a particular modification of each of the universal predicates of M to the exclusion of the rest.” Schleiermacher’s separation of inference from judgment and his attribution of the power to knowledge in process cannot find acceptance with Lotze. The psychologist and the formal logician do indeed join hands in the denial of a real movement of thought in syllogism. Lotze’s logic then, is formal in a sense in which a logic which does not find the conception of synthetic truth embarrassing is not so. It is canon and not organon. In the one case, however, where it recognizes what is truly synthesis, i.e. in its account of the concept, it brings the statics of knowledge, so to speak, into integral relation with the dynamics. And throughout, wherever the survival from 1843, the identity bug-bear, is for the moment got rid of in what is really a more liberal conception, the statical doctrine is developed in a brilliant and informing manner. Yet it is in the detail of his logical investigations, something too volatile to fix in summary, that Lotze’s greatness as a logician more especially lies.
With Lotze the ideal that at last the forms of thought shall be realized to be adequate to that which at any stage of actual knowledge always proves relatively intractable is an illuminating projection of faith. He takes courage from the reflection that to accept scepticism is to presume the competence of the thought that accepts. He will, however, take no easy way of parallelism. Our human thought pursues devious and circuitous methods. Its forms are not unseldom scaffolding for the house of knowledge rather than the framework of the house itself. Our task is not to realise correspondence with something other than thought, but to make explicit those justificatory notions which condition the form of our apprehension. “However much we may presuppose an original reference of the forms of thought to that nature of things which is the goal of knowledge, we must be prepared to find in them many elements which do not directly reproduce the actual reality to the knowledge of which they are to lead us.”[139] The impulse of thought to reduce coincidence to coherence reaches immediately only to objectivity or validity. The sense in which the presupposition of a further reference is to be interpreted and in which justificatory notions for it can be adduced is only determinable in a philosophic system as a whole, where feeling has a place as well as thought, value equally with validity.
Lotze’s logic then represents the statical aspect of the function of thought in knowledge, while, so far as we go in knowledge thought is always engaged in the unification of a manifold, which remains contradistinguished from it, though not, of course, completely alien to and unadapted to it. The further step to the determination of the ground of harmony is not to be taken in logic, where limits are present and untranscended.
The position of the search for truth, for which knowledge is a growing organism in which thought needs, so to speak, to feed on something other than itself, is conditioned in the post-Kantian period by antagonism to the speculative movement which culminated in the dialectic of Hegel. Logic as Metaphysic. The radical thought of this movement was voiced in the demand of Reinhold[140] that philosophy should “deduce” it all from a single principle and by a single method. Kant’s limits that must needs be thought and yet cannot be thought must be thought away. An earnest attempt to satisfy this demand was made by Fichte whose single principle was the activity of the pure Ego, while his single method was the assertion of a truth revealed by reflection on the content of conscious experience, the characterization of this as a half truth and the supplementation of it by its other, and finally the harmonization of both. The pure ego is inferred from the fact that the non-ego is realized only in the act of the ego in positing it. The ego posits itself, but reflection on the given shows that we must add that it posits also the non-ego. The two positions are to be conciliated in the thought of reciprocal limitation of the posited ego and non-ego. And so forth. Fichte cannot be said to have developed a logic, but this rhythm of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, foreshadowed in part for Fichte in Spinoza’s formula, “omnis determinatio est negatio” and significantly in Kant’s triadic grouping of his categories, gave a cue to the thought of Hegel. Schelling, too, called for a single principle and claimed to have found it in his Absolute, “the night” said Hegel, “in which all cows are black,” but his historical influence lay, as we have seen, in the direction of a parallelism within the unity, and he also developed no logic. It is altogether otherwise with Hegel.
Hegel’s logic,[141] though it involves inquiries which custom regards as metaphysical, is not to be characterized as a metaphysic with a method. It is logic or a rationale of thought by thought, with a full development among other matters of all that the most separatist of logicians regards Hegel. as thought forms. It offers a solution of what has throughout appeared as the logical problem. That solution lies doubtless in the evolution of the Idea, i.e. an all-inclusive in which mere or pure thought is cancelled in its separateness by a transfiguration, while logic is nothing but the science of the Idea viewed in the medium of pure thought. But, whatever else it be, this Panlogismus, to use the word of J. E. Erdmann, is at least a logic. Thought in its progressive unfolding, of which the history of philosophy taken in its broad outline offers a pageant, necessarily cannot find anything external to or alien from itself, though that there is something external for it is another matter. As Fichte’s Ego finds that its non-ego springs from and has its home within its very self, so with Hegel thought finds itself in its “other,” both subsisting in the Idea which is both and neither. Either of the two is the all, as, for example, the law of the convexity of the curve is the law of the curve and the law of its concavity. The process of the development of the Idea or Absolute is in one regard the immanent process of the all. Logically regarded, i.e. “in the medium of mere thought,” it is dialectical method. Any abstract and limited point of view carries necessarily to its contradictory. This can only be atoned with the original determination by fresh negation in which a new thought-determination is born, which is yet in a sense the old, though enriched, and valid on a higher plane. The limitations of this in turn cause a contradiction to emerge, and the process needs repetition. At last, however, no swing into the opposite, with its primarily conflicting, if ultimately complementary function, is any longer possible. That in which no further contradiction is possible is the absolute Idea. Bare or indeterminate being, for instance, the first of the determinations of Hegel’s logic, as the being of that which is not anything determinate, of Kant’s thing-in-itself, for example, positively understood, implicated at once the notion of not-being, which negates it, and is one with it, yet with a difference, so that we have the transition to determinate being, the transition being baptized as becoming. And so forth. It is easy to raise difficulties not only in regard to the detail in Hegel’s development of his categories, especially the higher ones, but also in regard to the essential rhythm of his method. The consideration that mere double negation leaves us precisely where we were and not upon a higher plane where the dominant concept is richer, is, of course, fatal only to certain verbal expressions of Hegel’s intent. There is a differentiation in type between the two negations. But if we grant this it is no longer obviously the simple logical operation indicated. It is inferred then that Hegel complements from the stuff of experience, and fails to make good the pretension of his method to be by itself and of itself the means of advance to higher and still higher concepts till it can rest in the Absolute. He discards, as it were, and takes in from the stock while professing to play from what he has originally in his hand. He postulates his unity in senses and at stages in which it is inadmissible, and so supplies only a schema of relations otherwise won, a view supported by the way in which he injects certain determinations in the process, e.g. the category of chemism. Has he not cooked the process in the light of the result? In truth the Hegelian logic suffers from the fact that the good to be reached is presupposed in the beginning. Nature, e.g., is not deduced as real because rational, but being real its rationality is presumed and, very imperfectly, exhibited in a way to make it possible to conceive it as in its essence the reflex of Reason. It is a vision rather than a construction. It is a “theosophical logic.” Consider the rational-real in the unity that must be, and this is the way of it, or an approximation to the way of it! It was inevitable that the epistemologists of the search for truth would have none of it. The ideal in whatsoever sense real still needs to be realized. It is from the human standpoint regulative and only hypothetically or formally constitutive. We must not confuse οὐσία with εἶναι, nor εἶναι with γίγνεσθαι.
Yet in a less ambitious form the fundamental contentions of Hegel’s method tend to find a qualified acceptance. In any piece of presumed knowledge its partial or abstract character involves the presence of loose edges which force the conviction of inadequacy and the development of contradictions. Contradictions must be annulled by complementation, with resultant increasing coherence in ascending stages. At each successive stage in our progress fresh contradictions break out, but the ideal of a station at which the thought-process and its other, if not one, are at one, is permissible as a limiting conception. Yet if Hegel meant only this he has indeed succeeded in concealing his meaning.
Hegel’s treatment of the categories or thought determinations which arise in the development of the immanent dialectic is rich in flashes of insight, but most of them are in the ordinary view of logic wholly metaphysical. In the stage, however, of his process in which he is concerned with the notion are to be found concept, judgment, syllogism. Of the last he declares that it “is the reasonable and everything reasonable” (Encyk. § 181), and has the phantasy to speak of the definition of the Absolute as being “at this stage” simply the syllogism. It is, of course, the rhythm of the syllogism that attracts him. The concept goes out from or utters itself in judgment to return to an enhanced unity in syllogism. Ueberweg (System § 101) is, on the whole, justified in exclaiming that Hegel’s rehabilitation of syllogism “did but slight service to the Aristotelian theory of syllogism,” yet his treatment of syllogism must be regarded as an acute contribution to logical criticism in the technical sense. He insists on its objectivity. The transition from judgment is not brought about by our subjective action. The syllogism of “all-ness” is convicted of a petitio principii (Encyk. § 190), with consequent lapse into the inductive syllogism, and, finally, since inductive syllogism is involved in the infinite process, into analogy. “The syllogism of necessity,” on the contrary, does not presuppose its conclusion in its premises. The detail, too, of the whole discussion is rich in suggestion, and subsequent logicians—Ueberweg himself perhaps, Lotze certainly in his genetic scale of types of judgment and inference, Professor Bosanquet notably in his systematic development of “the morphology of knowledge,” and others—have with reason exploited it.
Hegel’s logic as a whole, however, stands and falls not with his thoughts on syllogism, but with the claim made for the dialectical method that it exhibits logic in its integral unity with metaphysic, the thought-process as the self-revelation of the Idea. The claim was disallowed. To the formalist proper it was self-condemned in its pretension to develop the content of thought and its rejection of the formula of bare-identity. To the epistemologist it seemed to confuse foundation and keystone, and to suppose itself to build upon the latter in a construction illegitimately appropriative of materials otherwise accumulated. At most it was thought to establish a schema of formal unity which might serve as a regulative ideal. To the methodologist of science in genesis it appeared altogether to fail to satisfy any practical interest. Finally, to the psychologist it spelt the failure of intellectualism, and encouraged, therefore, some form of rehabilitated experientialism.
In the Hegelian school in the narrower sense the logic of the master receives some exegesis and defence upon single points of doctrine rather than as a whole. Its effect upon logic is rather to be seen in the rethinking of the traditional body of logical doctrine in the light of an absolute presupposed as ideal, with the postulate that a regulative ideal must ultimately exhibit itself as constitutive, the justification of the postulate being held to lie in the coherence and all-inclusiveness of the result. In such a logic, if and so far as coherence should be attained, would be found something akin to the spirit of what Hegel achieves, though doubtless alien to the letter of what it is his pretension to have achieved. There is perhaps no serious misrepresentation involved in regarding a key-thought of this type, though not necessarily expressed in those verbal forms, as pervading such logic of the present as coheres with a philosophy of the absolute conceived from a point of view that is intellectualist throughout. All other contemporary movements may be said to be in revolt from Hegel.
v. Logic from 1880–1910
Logic in the present exhibits, though in characteristically modified shapes, all the main types that have been found in its past history. There is an intellectualist logic coalescent with an absolutist metaphysic as aforesaid. There is an epistemological logic with sometimes formalist, sometimes methodological leanings. There is a formal-symbolic logic engaged with the elaboration of a relational calculus. Finally, there is what may be termed psychological-voluntaryist logic. It is in the rapidity of development of logical investigations of the third and fourth types and the growing number of their exponents that the present shows most clearly the history of logic in the making. All these movements are logic of the present, and a very brief indication may be added of points of historical significance.
Of intellectualist logic Francis Herbert Bradley[142] (b. 1846) and Bernard Bosanquet[143] (1848) may be taken as typical exponents. The philosophy of the former concludes to an Absolute by the annulment of contradictions, though the ladder of Hegel is conspicuous by its absence. His metaphysical method, however, is like Herbart’s, not identifiable with his logic, and the latter has for its central characteristic its thorough restatement of the logical forms traditional in language and the text-books, in such a way as to harmonize with the doctrine of a reality whose organic unity is all-inclusive. The thorough recasting that this involves, even of the thought of the masters when it occasionally echoes them, has resulted in a phrasing uncouth to the ear of the plain man with his world of persons and things in which the former simply think about the latter, but it is fundamentally necessary for Bradley’s purpose. The negative judgment, for example, cannot be held in one and the same undivided act to presuppose the unity of the real, project an adjective as conceivably applicable to it and assert its rejection. We need, therefore, a restatement of it. With Bradley reality is the one subject of all judgment immediate or mediate. The act of judgment “which refers an ideal content (recognized as such) to a reality beyond the act” is the unit for logic. Grammatical subject and predicate necessarily both fall under the rubric of the adjectival, that is, within the logical idea or ideal content asserted. This is a meaning or universal, which can have no detached or abstract self-subsistence. As found in judgment it may exhibit differences within itself, but it is not two, but one, an articulation of unity, not a fusion, which could only be a confusion, of differences. With a brilliant subtlety Bradley analyses the various types of judgment in his own way, with results that must be taken into account by all subsequent logicians of this type. The view of inference with which he complements it is only less satisfactory because of a failure to distinguish the principle of nexus in syllogism from its traditional formulation and rules, and because he is hampered by the intractability which he finds in certain forms of relational construction.
Bosanquet had the advantage that his logic was a work of a slightly later date. He is, perhaps, more able than Bradley has shown himself, to use material from alien sources and to penetrate to what is of value in the thought of writers from whom, whether on the whole or on particular issues, he disagrees. He treats the book-tradition, however, a debt to which, nowadays inevitable, he is generous in acknowledging,[144] with a judicious exercise of freedom in adaptation, i.e. constructively as datum, never eclectically. In his fundamental theory of judgment his obligation is to Bradley. It is to Lotze, however, that he owes most in the characteristic feature of his logic, viz., the systematic development of the types of judgment, and inference from less adequate to more adequate forms. His fundamental continuity with Bradley may be illustrated by his definition of inference. “Inference is the indirect reference to reality of differences within a universal, by means of the exhibition of this universal in differences directly referred to reality.”[145] Bosanquet’s Logic will long retain its place as an authoritative exposition of logic of this type.
Of epistemological logic in one sense of the phrase Lotze is still to be regarded as a typical exponent. Of another type Chr. Sigwart (q.v.) may be named as representative. Sigwart’s aim was “to reconstruct logic from the point of view of methodology.” His problem was the claim to arrive at propositions universally valid, and so true of the object, whosoever the individual thinker. His solution, within the Kantian circle of ideas, was that such principles as the Kantian principle of causality were justified as “postulates of the endeavour after complete knowledge.” “What Kant has shown is not that irregular fleeting changes can never be the object of consciousness, but only that the ideal consciousness of complete science would be impossible without the knowledge of the necessity of all events.”[146] “The universal presuppositions which form the outline of our ideal of knowledge are not so much laws which the understanding prescribes to nature . . . as laws which the understanding lays down for its own regulation in its investigation and consideration of nature. They are a priori because no experience is sufficient to reveal or confirm them in unconditional universality; but they are a priori . . . only in the sense of presuppositions without which we should work with no hope of success and merely at random and which therefore we must believe.” Finally they are akin to our ethical principles. With this coheres his dictum, with its far-reaching consequences for the philosophy of induction, that “the logical justification of the inductive process rests upon the fact that it is an inevitable postulate of our effort after knowledge, that the given is necessary, and can be known as proceeding from its grounds according to universal laws.”[147] It is characteristic of Sigwart’s point of view that he acknowledges obligation to Mill as well as to Ueberweg. The transmutation of Mill’s induction of inductions into a postulate is an advance of which the psychological school of logicians have not been slow to make use. The comparison of Sigwart with Lotze is instructive, in regard both to their agreement and their divergence as showing the range of the epistemological formula.
Of the formal-symbolic logic all that falls to be said here is, that from the point of view of logic as a whole, it is to be regarded as a legitimate praxis as long as it shows itself aware of the sense in which alone form is susceptible of abstraction, and is aware that in itself it offers no solution of the logical problem. “It is not an algebra,” said Kant[148] of his technical logic, and the kind of support lent recently to symbolic logic by the Gegenstandstheorie identified with the name of Alexius Meinong (b. 1853)[149] is qualified by the warning that the real activity of thought tends to fall outside the calculus of relations and to attach rather to the subsidiary function of denoting. The future of symbolic logic as coherent with the rest of logic, in the sense which the word has borne throughout its history seems to be bound up with the question of the nature of the analysis that lies behind the symbolism, and of the way in which this is justified in the setting of a doctrine of validity. The “theory of the object,” itself, while affecting logic alike in the formal and in the psychological conception of it very deeply, does not claim to be regarded as logic or a logic, apart from a setting supplied from elsewhere.
Finally we have a logic of a type fundamentally psychological, if it be not more properly characterized as a psychology which claims to cover the whole field of philosophy, including the logical field. The central and organizing principle of this is that knowledge is in genesis, that the genesis takes place in the medium of individual minds, and that this fact implies that there is a necessary reference throughout to interests or purposes of the subject which thinks because it wills and acts. Historically this doctrine was formulated as the declaration of independence of the insurgents in revolt against the pretensions of absolutist logic. It drew for support upon the psychological movement that begins with Fries and Herbart. It has been chiefly indebted to writers, who were not, or were not primarily, logicians, to Avenarius, for example, for the law of the economy of thought, to Wundt, whose system, and therewith his logic,[150] is a pendant to his psychology, for the volitional character of judgment, to Herbert Spencer and others. A judgment is practical, and not to be divorced without improper abstraction from the purpose and will that informs it. A concept is instrumental to an end beyond itself, without any validity other than its value for action. A situation involving a need of adaptation to environment arises and the problem it sets must be solved that the will may control environment and be justified by success. Truth is the improvised machinery that is interjected, so far as this works. It is clear that we are in the presence of what is at least an important half-truth, which intellectuallism with its statics of the rational order viewed as a completely articulate system has tended to ignore. It throws light on many phases of the search for truth, upon the plain man’s claim to start with a subject which he knows whose predicate which he does not know is still to be developed, or again upon his use of the negative form of judgment, when the further determination of his purposive system is served by a positive judgment from without, the positive content of which is yet to be dropped as irrelevant to the matter in hand. The movement has, however, scarcely developed its logic[151] except as polemic. What seems clear is that it cannot be the whole solution. While man must confront nature from the human and largely the practical standpoint, yet his control is achieved only by the increasing recognition of objective controls. He conquers by obedience. So truth works and is economical because it is truth. Working is proportioned to inner coherence. It is well that the view should be developed into all its consequences. The result will be to limit it, though perhaps also to justify it, save in its claim to reign alone.
There is, perhaps, an increasing tendency to recognize that the organism of knowledge is a thing which from any single viewpoint must be seen in perspective. It is of course a postulate that all truths harmonize, but to give the harmonious whole in a projection in one plane is an undertaking whose adequacy in one sense involves an inadequacy in another. No human architect can hope to take up in succession all essential points of view in regard to the form of knowledge or to logic. “The great campanile is still to finish.”
Bibliography.—Historical: No complete history of logic in the sense in which it is to be distinguished from theoretical philosophy in general has as yet been written. The history of logic is indeed so little intelligible apart from constant reference to tendencies in philosophical development as a whole, that the historian, when he has made the requisite preparatory studies, inclines to essay the more ambitious task. Yet there are, of course, works devoted to the history of logic proper.
Of these Prantl’s Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande (4 vols., 1855–1870), which traces the rise, development and fortunes of the Aristotelian logic to the close of the middle ages, is monumental. Next in importance are the works of L. Rabus, Logik und Metaphysik, i. (1868) (pp. 123-242 historical, pp. 453-518 bibliographical, pp. 514 sqq. a section on apparatus for the study of the history of logic), Die neuesten Bestrebungen auf dem Gebiete der Logik bei den Deutschen (1880), Logik (1895), especially for later writers § 17. Ueberweg’s System der Logik und Geschichte der logischen Lehren (4th ed. and last revised by the author, 1874, though it has been reissued later, Eng. trans., 1871) is alone to be named with these. Harms’ posthumously published Geschichte der Logik (1881) (Die Philosophie in ihrer Geschichte, ii.) was completed by the author only so far as Leibnitz. Blakey’s Historical Sketch of Logic (1851), though, like all this writer’s works, closing with a bibliography of some pretensions, is now negligible. Franck, Esquisse d’une histoire de la logique (1838) is the chief French contribution to the subject as a whole.
Of contributions towards the history of special periods or schools of logical thought the list, from the opening chapters of Ramus’s Scholae Dialecticae (1569) downwards (v. Rabus loc. cit.) would be endless. What is of value in the earlier works has now been absorbed. The System der Logik (1828) of Bachmann (a Kantian logician of distinction) contains a historical survey (pp. 569-644), as does the Denklehre (1822) of van Calker (allied in thought to Fries) pp. 12 sqq.; Eberstein’s Geschichte der Logik und Metaphysik bei den Deutschen von Leibniz bis auf gegenwärtige Zeit (latest edition, 1799) is still of importance in regard to logicians of the school of Wolff and the origines of Kant’s logical thought. Hoffmann, the editor and disciple of von Baader, published Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Begriffe der Logik in Deutschland von Kant bis Baader (1851). Wallace’s prolegomena and notes to his Logic of Hegel (1874, revised and augmented 1892–1894) are of use for the history and terminology, as well as the theory. Riehl’s article entitled Logik in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, vi. 1. Systematische Philosophie (1907), is excellent, and touches on quite modern developments. Liard, Les Logiciens Anglais Contemporains (5th ed., 1907), deals only with the 19th-century inductive and formal-symbolic logicians down to Jevons, to whom the book was originally dedicated. Venn’s Symbolic Logic (1881) gave a careful history and bibliography of that development. The history of the more recent changes is as yet to be found only in the form of unshaped material in the pages of review and Jahresbericht. (H. W. B.*)
- ↑ Cf. Heidel, “The Logic of the Pre-Socratic Philosophy,” in Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory (Chicago, 1903).
- ↑ Heraclitus, Fragmm. 107 (Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker) and 2, on which see Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 153 note (ed. 2).
- ↑ e.g. Diog. Laërt. ix. 25, from the lost Sophistes of Aristotle.
- ↑ Plato and Platonism, p. 24.
- ↑ Nothing is. If anything is, it cannot be known. If anything is known it cannot be communicated.
- ↑ Metaphys. μ. 1078b 28 sqq.
- ↑ Cf. Arist. Top. θ. i. 1 ad fin.
- ↑ For whom see Dümmler, Antisthenica (1882, reprinted in his Kleine Schriften, 1901).
- ↑ Aristotle, Metaphys. 1024b 32 sqq.
- ↑ Plato, Theaetetus, 201 E. sqq., where, however, Antisthenes is not named, and the reference to him is sometimes doubted. But cf. Aristotle, Met. H 3. 1043b 24-28.
- ↑ Diog. Laërt. ii. 107.
- ↑ Aristotle, An. Pr. i. 31, 46a 32 sqq.; cf. 91b 12 sqq.
- ↑ Athenaeus ii. 59c. See Usener, Organisation der wissenschaftl. Arbeit (1884; reprinted in his Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1907).
- ↑ Socrates’ reference of a discussion to its presuppositions (Xenophon, Mem. iv. 6, 13) is not relevant for the history of the terminology of induction.
- ↑ Theaetetus, 186c.
- ↑ Timaeus, 37a, b (quoted in H. F. Carlill’s translation of the Theaetetus, p. 60).
- ↑ Theaetetus, 186d.
- ↑ Sophistes, 253d.
- ↑ Ib. id.; cf. Theaetetus, 197d.
- ↑ Aristotle, de An. 430b 5, and generally iii. 2, iii. 5.
- ↑ For Plato’s Logic, the controversies as to the genuineness of the dialogues may be treated summarily. The Theaetetus labours under no suspicion. The Sophistes is apparently matter for animadversion by Aristotle in the Metaphysics and elsewhere, but derives stronger support from the testimonies to the Politicus which presumes it. The Politicus and Philebus are guaranteed by the use made of them in Aristotle’s Ethics. The rejection of the Parmenides would involve the paradox of a nameless contemporary of Plato and Aristotle who was inferior as a metaphysician to neither. No other dialogue adds anything to the logical content of these. Granted their genuineness, the relative dating of three of them is given, viz. Theaetetus, Sophistes and Politicus in the order named. The Philebus seems to presuppose Politicus, 283-284, but if this be an error, it will affect the logical theory not at all. There remains the Parmenides. It can scarcely be later than the Sophistes. The antinomies with which it concludes are more naturally taken as a prelude to the discussion of the Sophistes than as an unnecessary retreatment of the doctrine of the one and the many in a more negative form. It may well be earlier than the Theaetetus in its present form. The stylistic argument shows the Theaetetus relatively early. The maturity of its philosophic outlook tends to give it a place relatively advanced in the Platonic canon. To meet the problem here raised, the theory has been devised of an earlier and a later version. The first may have linked on to the series of Plato’s dialogues of search, and to put the Parmenides before it is impossible. The second, though it might still have preceded the Parmenides might equally well have followed the negative criticism of that dialogue, as the beginning of reconstruction. For Plato’s logic this question only has interest on account of the introduction of an Ἀριστοτέλης in a non-speaking part in the Parmenides. If this be pressed as suggesting that the philosopher Aristotle was already in full activity at the date of writing, it is of importance to know what Platonic dialogues were later than the début of his critical pupil. On the stylistic argument as applied to Platonic controversies Janell’s Quaestiones Platonicae (1901) is important. On the whole question of genuineness and dates of the dialogues, H. Raeder, Platons philosophische Entwickelung (1905), gives an excellent conspectus of the views held and the grounds alleged. See also Plato.
- ↑ E.g. that of essence and accident. Republic, 454.
- ↑ E.g. the discussion of correlation, ib. 437 sqq.
- ↑ Politicus, 285d.
- ↑ Sophistes, 261c sqq.
- ↑ E.g. in Nic. Eth. i. 6.
- ↑ Philebus, 16d.
- ↑ Principal edition still that of Waitz, with Latin commentary, (2 vols., 1844–1846). Among the innumerable writers who have thrown light upon Aristotle’s logical doctrine, St Hilaire, Trendelenburg, Ueberweg, Hamilton, Mansel, G. Grote may be named. There are, however, others of equal distinction. Reference to Prantl, op. cit., is indispensable. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, ii. 2, “Aristoteles” (3rd ed., 1879), pp. 185-257 (there is an Eng. trans.), and Maier, Die Syllogistik des Aristoteles (2 vols., 1896, 1900) (some 900 pp.), are also of first-rate importance.
- ↑ Sophist. Elench. 184, espec. b 1-3, but see Maier, loc. cit. i. 1.
- ↑ References such as 18b 12 are the result of subsequent editing and prove nothing. See, however, Aristotle.
- ↑ Adrastus is said to have called them πρὸ τῶν τοπικῶν.
- ↑ Metaphys. E. 1.
- ↑ De Part. Animal. A. 1, 639a 1 sqq.; cf. Metaphys. 1005b 2 sqq.
- ↑ De Interpretatione 16a sqq.
- ↑ De Interpretatione 16a 24-25.
- ↑ Ib. 18a 28 sqq.
- ↑ Ib. 19a 28-29.
- ↑ As shown e.g. by the way in which the relativity of sense and the object of sense is conceived, 7b 35-37.
- ↑ Topics 101a 27 and 36-b 4.
- ↑ Topics 100.
- ↑ Politics 1282a 1 sqq.
- ↑ 103b 21.
- ↑ Topics 160a 37-b 5.
- ↑ This is the explanation of the formal definition of induction, Prior Analytics, ii. 23, 68b 15 sqq.
- ↑ 45.0 45.1 25b 36.
- ↑ Prior Analytics, i. 1. 24a 18-20, Συλλογισμὸς δὲ ἑστὶ λόγος ἐν ᾦ τεθέντων τινῶν ἕτερόν τι τῶν κειμένων ἐξ ἀνάγκης σνμβαίνει τῷ ταῦτα εἶναι. The equivalent previously in Topics 100a 25 sqq.
- ↑ Prior Analytics, ii. 21; Posterior Analytics, i. 1.
- ↑ 67a 33-37, μὴ συνθεωρῶν τὸ καθ᾽ ἑκάτερον.
- ↑ 67a 39-63.
- ↑ 79a 4-5.
- ↑ 24b 10-11.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, i. 4 καθ᾽ αὐτὸ means (1) contained in the definition of the subject; (2) having the subject contained in its definition, as being an alternative determination of the subject, crooked, e.g. is per se of line; (3) self-subsistent; (4) connected with the subject as consequent to ground. Its needs stricter determination therefore.
- ↑ 73b 26 sqq., 74a 37 sqq.
- ↑ 90b 16.
- ↑ Metaphys. Z. 12, H. 6 ground this formula metaphysically.
- ↑ 94a 12, 75b 32.
- ↑ 90a 6. Cf. Ueberweg, System der Logik, § 101.
- ↑ 78a 30 sqq.
- ↑ Topics, 101b 18, 19.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, ii. 13.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, ii. 16.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, i. 13 ad. fin., and i. 27. The form which a mathematical science treats as relatively self-subsistent is certainly not the constitutive idea.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, i. 3.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, ii. 19.
- ↑ De Anima, 428b 18, 19.
- ↑ Prior Analytics, i. 30, 46a 18.
- ↑ Topics, 100b 20, 21.
- ↑ Topics, 101a 25, 36-37, b1-4, &c.
- ↑ Zeller (loc. cit. p. 194), who puts this formula in order to reject it.
- ↑ Metaphys. Δ 1, 1013a 14.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, 72a 16 seq.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, 77a 26, 76a 37 sqq.
- ↑ Metaphys. Γ.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, ii. 19.
- ↑ de Anima, iii. 4-6.
- ↑ Metaphys. M. 1087a 10-12; Zeller loc. cit. 304 sqq.; McLeod Innes, The Universal and Particular in Aristotle’s Theory of Knowledge (1886).
- ↑ Topics, 105a 13.
- ↑ Metaphys. 995a 8.
- ↑ E.g., Topics, 108b 10, “to induce” the universal.
- ↑ Posterior Analytics, ii. 19, 100b 3, 4.
- ↑ Topics, i. 18, 108b 10.
- ↑ Prior Analytics, ii. 23.
- ↑ Παράδειγμα, Prior Analytics, ii. 24.
- ↑ Sigwart, Logik, Eng. trans. vol. ii. p. 292 and elsewhere.
- ↑ Ueberweg, System, § 127, with a ref. to de Partibus Animalium, 667a.
- ↑ See 67a 17 ἐξ ἁπάντων τῶν ἀτόμων.
- ↑ Ἐπιφορά. Ἐπι = “in” as in ἐπαγωγὴ, inductio, and -φορὰ = -ferentia, as in διαφορὰ, differentia.
- ↑ Diog. Laërt. x. 33 seq.; Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. vii. 211.
- ↑ Diog. Laërt. x. 87; cf. Lucretius, vi. 703 sq., v. 526 sqq. (ed. Munro).
- ↑ Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhon. Hypotyp. ii. 195, 196.
- ↑ Sextus, op. cit. ii. 204.
- ↑ Op. cit. iii. 17 sqq., and especially 28.
- ↑ The point is raised by Aristotle, 95a.
- ↑ See Jourdain, Recherches critiques sur l’âge et l’origine des traductions latines d’Aristote (1843).
- ↑ See E. Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem, i. 134 seq., and the justificatory excerpts, pp. 539 sqq.
- ↑ See Riehl in Vierteljahrschr. f. wiss. Philos. (1893).
- ↑ Bacon, Novum Organum, ii. 22, 23; cf. also Aristotle, Topics i. 12. 13, ii. 10. 11 (Stewart, ad Nic. Eth. 1139b 27) and Sextus Empiricus, Pyrr. Hypot. iii. 15.
- ↑ Bacon’s Works, ed. Ellis and Spedding, iii. 164-165.
- ↑ A notable formula of Bacon’s Novum Organum ii. 4 § 3 turns out, Valerius Terminus, cap. 11, to come from Aristotle, Post. An. i. 4 via Ramus. See Ellis in Bacon’s Works, iii. 203 sqq.
- ↑ De Civitate Dei, xi. 26. “Certum est me esse, si fallor.”
- ↑ Cf. Plato, Republic, 381e seq.
- ↑ Elementa Philosophiæ, i. 3. 20, i. 6. 17 seq.
- ↑ Hobbes, Elementa Philosophiæ, i. 1. 5.
- ↑ Id. ib. i. 6. 16.
- ↑ Id. ib. i. 4. 8; cf. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding, iv. 17.
- ↑ Id. Leviathan, i. 3.
- ↑ Id. Elem. Philos. i. 6. 10.
- ↑ Condillac, Langue des Calculs, p. 7.
- ↑ Locke, Essay, iii. 3.
- ↑ Id. ib. iv. 17.
- ↑ Loc. cit. § 8.
- ↑ Id. ib. iv. 4, §§ 6 sqq.
- ↑ Berkeley, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, § 142.
- ↑ Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, i. 1. 7 (from Berkeley, op. cit., introd., §§ 15-16).
- ↑ Essay, iv. 17, § 3.
- ↑ Treatise of Human Nature, i. 3. 15.
- ↑ Mill, Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, cap. 17.
- ↑ Cf. Mill, Autobiography, p. 159. “I grappled at once with the problem of Induction, postponing that of Reasoning.” Ib. p. 182 (when he is preoccupied with syllogism), “I could make nothing satisfactory of Induction at this time.”
- ↑ Autobiography, p. 181.
- ↑ The insight, for instance, of F. H. Bradley’s criticism, Principles of Logic, II. ii. 3, is somewhat dimmed by a lack of sympathy due to extreme difference in the point of view adopted.
- ↑ Bacon, Novum organum, i. 100.
- ↑ Russell’s Philosophy of Leibnitz, capp. 1-5.
- ↑ See especially remarks on the letter of M. Arnauld (Gerhardt’s edition of the philosophical works, ii. 37 sqq.).
- ↑ Gerhardt, vi. 612, quoted by Russell, loc. cit., p. 19.
- ↑ Ibid., ii. 62, Russell, p. 33.
- ↑ Spinoza, ed. van Vloten and Land, i. 46 (Ethica, i. 11).
- ↑ Nouveaux essais, iv. 2 § 9, 17 § 4 (Gerhardt v. 351, 460).
- ↑ Critique of Judgment, Introd. § 2, ad. fin. (Werke, Berlin Academy edition, vol. v. p. 176, l. 10).
- ↑ Kant’s Introduction to Logic and his Essay on the Mistaken Subtlety of the Four Figures, trans. T. K. Abbott (1885).
- ↑ Loc. cit., p. 11.
- ↑ Or antitheses. Kant follows, for example, a different line of cleavage between form and content from that developed between thought and the “given.” And these are not his only unresolved dualities, even in the Critique of Pure Reason. For the logical inquiry, however, it is permissible to ignore or reduce these differences. The determination too of the sense in which Kant’s theory of knowledge involves an unresolved antithesis is for the logical purpose necessary so far only as it throws light upon his logic and his influence upon logical developments. Historically the question of the extent to which writers adopted the dualistic interpretation or one that had the like consequences is of greater importance. It may be said summarily that Kant holds the antithesis between thought and “the given” to be unresolved and within the limits of theory of knowledge irreducible. The dove of thought falls lifeless if the resistant atmosphere of “the given” be withdrawn (Critique of Pure Reason, ed. 2 Introd. Kant’s Werke, ed. of the Prussian Academy, vol. iii. p. 32, ll. 10 sqq.). Nevertheless the thing-in-itself is a problematic conception and of a limiting or negative use merely. He “had woven,” according to an often quoted phrase of Goethe, “a certain sly element of irony into his method; ... he pointed as it were with a side gesture beyond the limits which he himself had drawn.” Thus (loc. cit. p. 46, ll. 8, 9) he declares that “there are two lineages united in human knowledge, which perhaps spring from a common stock, though to us unknown—namely sense and understanding.” Some indication of the way in which he would hypothetically and speculatively mitigate the antithesis is perhaps afforded by the reflection that the distinction of the mental and what appears as material is an external distinction in which the one appears outside to the other. “Yet what as thing-in-itself lies back of the phenomenon may perhaps not be so wholly disparate after all” (ib. p. 278, ll. 26 sqq.).
- ↑ Critique of Judgment, Introd. § 2 (Werke, v., 276 ll. 9 sqq.); cf. Bernard’s “Prolegomena” to his translation of this, (pp. xxxviii. sqq.).
- ↑ Die Logik, insbesondere die Analytik (Schleswig, 1825). August Detlev Christian Twesten (1789–1876), a Protestant theologian, succeeded Schleiermacher as professor in Berlin in 1835.
- ↑ See Sir William Hamilton: The Philosophy of Perception, by J. Hutchison Stirling.
- ↑ Hauptpunkte der Logik, 1808 (Werke, ed. Hartenstein, i. 465 sqq.), and specially Lehrbuch der Einleitung in die Philosophie (1813), and subsequently §§ 34 sqq. (Werke, i. 77 sqq.).
- ↑ See Ueberweg, System of Logic and History of Logical Doctrines, § 34.
- ↑ Drei Bücher der Logik, 1874 (E.T., 1884). The Book on Pure Logic follows in essentials the line of thought of an earlier work (1843).
- ↑ Logic, Eng. trans. 35 ad. fin.
- ↑ Logic, Introd. § ix.
- ↑ For whom see Höffding, History of Modern Philosophy, Eng. trans., vol. ii. pp. 122 sqq.; invaluable for the logical methods of modern philosophers.
- ↑ Wissenschaft der Logik (1812–1816), in course of revision at Hegel’s death in 1831 (Werke, vols. iii.-v.), and Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, i.; Die Logik (1817; 3rd ed., 1830); Werke, vol. vi., Eng. trans., Wallace (2nd ed., 1892).
- ↑ The Principles of Logic (1883).
- ↑ Logic, or The Morphology of Thought (2 vols., 1888).
- ↑ Logic, Pref. pp. 6 seq.
- ↑ Id. vol. ii. p. 4.
- ↑ Logik (1873, 1889), Eng. trans. ii. 17.
- ↑ Op. cit. ii. 289.
- ↑ Introd. to Logic., trans. Abbott, p. 10.
- ↑ Ueber Annahmen (1902, &c.).
- ↑ Logik (1880, and in later editions).
- ↑ Yet see Studies in Logic, by John Dewey and others (1903).