unwieldy symbolism. Still, modern mathematical logic, such as that of Russell's Principles of Mathematics, is but a development of Peirce's logic of relatives.
This phase of Peirce's work is highly technical and an account of it is out of place here. Such an account will be found in Lewis' Survey of Symbolic Logic.[17] I refer to it here only to remind the reader that the Illustrations of the Logic of the Sciences (Part I of this volume) have a background of patient detailed work which is still being developed to-day.
Symbolic logic has been held in rather low esteem by the followers of the old classical methods in philosophy. Their stated objection to it has been mainly that it is concerned with the minutiae of an artificial language and is of no value as a guide to the interpretation of reality. Now it should be readily admitted that preoccupation with symbolic logic is rather apt to retard the irresponsible flight of philosophic fancy. Yet this is by no means always an evil. By insisting on an accuracy that is painful to those impatient to obtain sweeping and comforting, though hasty, conclusions, symbolic logic is well calculated to remove the great scandal of traditional philosophy—the claim of absolutely certain results in fields where there is the greatest conflict of opinion. This scandalous situation arises in part from the fact that in popular exposition we do not have to make our premises or assumptions explicit; hence all sorts of dubious prejudices are implicitly appealed to as abso-*
