SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
with the case and formulated it correctly? If it is quite certain that the "law" applies to the "case", his conclusion proves nothing new; if it is not, he runs the risk that the case of which he is trying to predict the behavior may be so exceptional as to break or modify his law. And if he runs that risk, is he not renouncing his ideal of reaching fool-proof certainty?
There seems to be no way, therefore, of saving "valid inference", of so interpreting the syllogism that it is both formally valid and humanly instructive. If it is to be instructive, it can only enlighten human ignorance, and then its premises cannot be certainly true.[1]
Some critics, having in mind how little attention is paid to formal logic in American schools, have expressed the opinion that Schiller was wasting his powder on dead game. But however little it may be used in reasoning, formal logic is still the object of formal reverence everywhere, and in Oxford it is strongly entrenched and heavily subsidized as Schiller says in the passage:
That the same doctrine, in perfect verbal continuity, should have been taught and examined on for over two thousand years would be the most stupendous fact in education, were it not surpassed by the still more surprising fact that during all this time no one has arisen to call it nonsense through and through, and that every would-be improvement
- ↑ "Logic versus Life" in The Independent, vol. 73, p. 375.
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