Euthydemus.
Introduction
the different spheres of knowledge they are to be studied ; if not,
not. The better part of ancient logic appears hardly in our own
day to have a separate existence ; it is absorbed in two other
sciences : (i) rhetoric, if indeed this ancient art be not also fading
away into literary criticism ; (2) the science of language, under
which all questions relating to words and propositions and the
combinations of them may properly be included.
To continue dead or imaginary sciences, which make no signs of progress and have no definite sphere, tends to interfere with the prosecution of living ones. The study of them is apt to blind the judgment and to render men incapable of seeing the value of evidence, and even of appreciating the nature of truth. Nor should we allow the living science to become confused with the dead by an ambiguity of language. The term logic has two different meanings, an ancient and a modern one, and we vainly try to bridge the gulf between them. Many perplexities are avoided by keeping them apart. There might certainly be a new science of logic ; it would not however be built up out of the fragments of the old, but would be distinct from them — relative to the state of knowledge which exists at the present time, and based chiefly on the methods of Modern Inductive philosophy. Such a science might have two legitimate fields : first, the refutation and explanation of false philosophies still hovering in the air as they appear from the point of view of later experience or are comprehended in the history of the human mind, as in a larger horizon : secondly, it might furnish new forms of thought more adequate to the expression of all the diversities and oppositions of knowledge which have grown up in these latter days ; it might also suggest new methods of enquiry derived from the comparison of the sciences. Few will deny that the introduction of the words 'subject' and 'object' and the Hegelian reconciliation of opposites have been ' most gracious aids ' to psychology, or that the methods of Bacon and Mill have shed a light far and wide on the realms of knowledge. These two great studies, the one destructive and corrective of error, the other conservative and constructive of trutli, might be a first and second part of logic. Ancient logic would be the propaedeutic or gate of approach to logical science, — nothing more. But to pursue such speculations further, though not irrelevant, might lead us too far away from the argument of the dialogue.
