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,
