from being misled by the usual fallacies tbat are put forward in treatises on logic as exercises in the art, as if he had been regularly trained to discourse of an illicit process of the minor, or an undistributed middle term. Dr. Whateley's treatise, is, I believe, considered a text book on this subject, and at the end of it, he has given more than an hundred examples of propositions which may be taken fairly enough as tests of the value of all the precepts that precede them. I took the trouble to read them through lately, and I own that I should be grievously disappointed if any of those whom I see in the front benches before me would find much difficulty in distinguishing on the first perusal which are true and which are false inferences among them; though probably there are few, if any, who can use the received logical phraseology in describing the process by which he arrived at his conviction in each case.
"Ménage probably meant nothing more than a lively joke when he defined logic to be 'the art of talking unintelligibly of things of which we are ignorant'; for to take this sarcasm seriously would imply a complete misapprehension of the objects of the science: nevertheless, it is not denied by any who are acquainted with the history of philosophy in Europe, it is indeed admitted by the friends of formal logic, though of course they seek to avoid the inference drawn from their admission, that men never reasoned worse than when the science of formal reasoning was in greatest vogue and reputation. I have been informed that the Hindus possess a Sanscrit form of the same science, which does not appear to have been more fortunate as an improver of the reasoning faculty in man, than its European brother.
"The study of metaphysics, which term I do not now use in the extensive sense given to it by some German philosophers, according to whom it seems to include almost every possible branch of human knowledge, but with the more confined and yet still sufficiently wide meaning of the study of the laws of human perceptions, thoughts and feelings, is most interesting and important: but the vagueness of it, still more than the difficulty, renders it in my opinion ill-suited for the purpose which I now have in view. The real progress that has been made in it is very slight, and the primary truths, on which its conclusions must be made to rest, cannot be exhibited as it were experimentally and objectively by the teacher: he is forced to call on his pupils to exercise a process of self-examination, in order to understand and assent to his theory, which even highly cultivated minds find difficult to sustain long, and which presupposes a considerable amount of mental training in the
