SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
While traditional logic has much to say about truth, the truth it talks about is mere formal consistency, since it declines to consider the material application of its premises. Relevance—a fundamental conception of concrete thought—is excluded because it goes with selection, with selection of the part that is useful, while formal logic professes an all-inclusive ideal. Selection, moreover, is a voluntary and hence arbitrary act, and so is shut out from a doctrine that acknowledges only what is purely theoretical. Finally, formal logic, with its creed of absolute certitude, abhors the very mention of adventure and risk, the life blood of actual human thinking, which is aroused by doubts and questions, and proceeds by guesses, hypotheses, and experiments, to a decision which is always somewhat arbitrary and subject to the risk of later revision.
Much of the criticism of "Formal Logic" contained in this large volume is too technical for any save professionals to follow, but at my request Mr. Schiller was kind enough to write an article for The Independent putting the main points of it in a form "understanded of the common people." From this I quote the passage in which he shows that the syllogism cannot lead unerringly to new truth:
The peculiar aim of logic hitherto has been to discover a form of "valid inference." By this was meant a form of words so fool-proof that it could not be misapplied, and that the use of it would absolutely guarantee the soundness of the conclusion if only the reasoning had been fortunate
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