Thomas Case and Herbert William Blunt

“ The manifold affections of sense are not simply aggregated in the individual, like the heroes in the Trojan horse. There must be convergence in a unitary principle, soul or consciousness, which is that which really functions in perception, the senses and their organs being merely its instruments. It is this unity of apperception which enables us to combine the data of more than one sense, to affirm reality, unreality, identity, difference, unity, plurality and so forth, as also the good, the beautiful and their contraries. ”

“ The faith of science looks outward as in the dawn of Greek philosophy, and subjectivism such as Hume’s has as yet no hold. Bacon summing up the movement so far as he understood it, in a rather belated way, has no theory of knowledge beyond the metaphor of the mirror held up to nature. Yet he offers an ambitious logic of science, and the case is typical.
The science of the Renaissance differs from that of the false dawn in Greek times in the fact of fruitfulness. It had the achievement of the old world in the field of mathematics upon which to build. ”

“ When I feel pleased or pained, or when I use my senses to perceive a pressure, a temperature, a flavour, an odour, a colour, a sound, or when I am conscious of feeling and perceiving, I cannot resist the belief that something sensible is present; and this belief that something exists is already a judgment, a judgment of existence, and, so far as it is limited to sense without inference, a true judgment. ”

“ Logic is the science of all inference, beginning from sense and ending in reason.
In conclusion, the logic of the last quarter of the 19th century may be said to be animated by a spirit of inquiry, marred by a love of paradox and a corresponding hatred of tradition. But we have found, on the whole, that logical tradition rises superior to logical innovation. There are two old logics which still remain indispensable, Aristotle’s Organon and Bacon’s Novum Organum. ”

“ The doom of the Scholastic Aristotle was nevertheless not the rehabilitation of the Greek Aristotle. Between him and the tide of feeling at the Renaissance lay the whole achievement of Arab science. That impatience of authority to which we owe the Renaissance, the Reformation and the birth of Nationalism, is not stilled by the downfall of Aristotle as the nomen appellativum of the schools. The appeal is to experience, somewhat vaguely defined, as against all authority, to the book of nature and no other. At last the world undertakes to enlarge the circle of its ideas. ”

“ At any rate, even when we have learnt to speak, we do not express all we think, as we may see not only from the fewness of words known to a child, but also from our own adult consciousness. The principle of thought is to judge enough to conclude. The principle of language is to speak only so far as to understand and be understood. Hence speech is only a curtailed expression of thought. Sometimes we express a whole judgment by one word, e.g. “Fire!” or by a phrase, e.g. “What a fire!” and only usually by a proposition. ”

“ Introduction.—Logic is the science of the processes of inference. What, then, is inference? It is that mental operation which proceeds by combining two premises so as to cause a consequent conclusion. Some suppose that we may infer from one premise by a so-called “immediate inference.” But one premise can only reproduce itself in another form, e.g. all men are some animals; therefore some animals are men. It requires the combination of at least two premises to infer a conclusion different from both. ”

“ But Kant’s criticism and Sigwart’s corollary only derive plausibility from a false definition of truth. Truth is not the agreement of knowledge with an object beyond itself, and therefore ex hypothesi unknowable, but the agreement of our judgments with the objects of our knowledge. A judgment is true whenever it is a belief that a thing is determined as it is known to be by sense, or by memory after sense, or by inference from sense, however indirect the inference may be, and even when in the form of inference of non-existence it extends consequently from primary to secondary judgments. ”

“ What idea can the physicist form of intraspatial ether? What believer in God pretends to conceive Him as He really is? We believe many things that we cannot conceive; as Mill said, the inconceivable is not the incredible; and the point of science is not what we can conceive but what we should believe on evidence. Conception is the weakest, judgment the strongest power of man’s mind. ”

“ Empirical logic, the logic of Aristotle and Bacon, is on the right way. It is the business of the logician to find the causes of the judgments which form the premises and the conclusions of inference, reasoning and science. What knowledge do we get by sense, memory and experience, the first mental causes of judgment? What is judgment, and what its various kinds? What is inference, how does it proceed by combining judgments as premises to cause judgments as conclusions, and what are its various kinds? How does inference draw conclusions more or less probable up to moral certainty? ”

“ Sense is the origin of judgment. One who feels pained or pleased, who feels hot or cold or resisting in touch, who tastes the flavoured, who smells the odorous, who hears the sounding, who sees the coloured, or is conscious, already believes that something sensible exists before conception, before inference, and before language; and his belief is true of the immediate object of sense, the sensible thing, e.g. the hot felt in touch. But a belief in the existence of something is a judgment and a categorical judgment of existence. ”

“ Consequently, as knowledge is attainable by sense, memory and inference, truth is also attainable, because, though we cannot test what we know by something else, we can test what we judge and assert by what we know. Not that all inference is knowledge, but it is sometimes. The aim of logic in general is to find the laws of all inference, which, so far as it obeys those laws, is always consistent, but is true or false according to its data as well as its consistency ”

“ Metaphysics is the science of being in general, and therefore of the things which become objects apprehended by our minds. Psychology is the science of mind in general, and therefore of the mental operations, of which inference is one. Logic is the science of the processes of inference. ”

“ The fact is that the uniformity of nature stands to induction as the axioms of syllogism do to syllogism; they are not premises, but conditions of inference, which ordinary men use spontaneously, as was pointed out in Physical Realism, and afterwards in Venn’s Empirical Logic. The axiom of contradiction is not a major premise of a judgment: the dictum de omni et nullo is not a major premise of a syllogism: the principle of uniformity is not a major premise of an induction. Induction, in fact, is no species of deduction ”

“ Truth proper, as Aristotle said in the Metaphysics, is in the mind: it is not being, but one’s signification of being. Its requisites are that there are things to be known and powers of knowing things. It is an attribute of judgments and derivatively of propositions. That judgment is true which apprehends a thing as it is capable of being known to be; and that proposition is true which so asserts the thing to be. Or, to combine truth in thought and in speech, the true is what signifies a thing as it is capable of being known. ”

“ The Aristotelian theory of the universal of science as secure from dependence on its instances and the theory of linking in syllogism remain a heritage for all later logic, whether accepted in precisely Aristotle’s formula or no. It is because the intervening centuries had the Aristotelian basis to work on, sometimes in reduced quantity and corrupt form, but always in some quantity and some form, that the rest of our logical tradition is what it is. ”

“ In reality, the sensation and the belief are sufficient; when I feel a sensible pressure, I cannot help believing in its reality, and therefore judging that it is real, without any tertium quid—an idea of pressure, or of existence or of pressure existing—intervening between the sensation and the belief. Only after sensation has ceased does an idea, or representation of what is not presented, become necessary as a substitute for a sensation and as a condition not of the first judgment that there is, but of a second judgment that there was, something sensible. ”

“ And he was a clearer thinker than Hamilton. Formal logic of the extremest rigour is nowhere to be found more adequately expressed in all its strength, and it must be added in all its weakness, than in the writings of Mansel. But if the view maintained above that formal logic must compromise or mitigate its rigour and so fail to maintain its independence, be correct, the logical consistency of Mansel’s logic of consistency does but emphasize its barrenness. It contains no germ for further development. It is the end of a movement. ”

“ The obscurer premises of analogy and induction, together with the paucity of experience and the backward state of physical science in Aristotle’s time would have baffled even his analytical genius. On the other hand, the demonstrations of mathematical sciences of his time, and the logical forms of deduction evinced in Plato’s dialogues, provided him with admirable examples of deduction, which is also the inference most capable of analysis. Aristotle’s analysis of the syllogism showed man how to advance by combining his thoughts in trains of deductive reasoning. ”

“ With regard to inference, he remarked that a universal judgment means by “all,” not every individual we know, but every individual absolutely, so that, when it becomes a major premise, we know therein every individual universally, not individually, and often do not know a given individual individually until we add a minor premise in a syllogism. Whereas, then, a particular judgment is a belief that some, a universal judgment is a belief that all, the individuals of a kind or total of similar individuals, are similarly determined, whether they are known or unknown individuals. ”

“ Again, so long as we keep to the syllogism as complete in itself and without reference to its place in the great structure of knowledge, the nerve of proof cannot be conceived in other than a formal manner. In analytic we work with an ethos different from that of dialectic. We presume truth and not probability or concession, but a true conclusion can follow from false premises, and it is only in the attempt to derive the premises in turn from their grounds that we unmask the deception. The passage to the conception of system is still required. ”

“ We discard the conception of the universal as a predicate applicable to a plurality, or even to all, of the members of a group. To know merely κατὰ παντὸς is not to know, save accidentally. The exhaustive judgment, if attainable, could not be known to be exhaustive. The universal is the ground of the empirical “all” and not conversely. ”

“ The generalization of a class is not, as the conceptual logic assumes, the abstraction of a general idea, but an inference from the analogy of a whole individual thing, e.g. a whole man, to a whole number of similar individuals, e.g. the whole of men. The general idea of all men or the combination that the idea of all men is similar to the idea of particular men would not be enough; the universal premise that all men in fact are similar to those who have died is required to induce the universal conclusion that all men in fact die. ”

“ In dealing with Bradley’s works we feel inclined to repeat what Aristotle says of the discourses of Socrates: they all exhibit excellence, cleverness, novelty and inquiry, but their truth is a difficult matter; and the Socratic paradox that virtue is knowledge is not more difficult than the Bradleian paradox that as two different things are the same, inference is identification. The basis of Bradley’s logic is the fallacious dialectic of Hegel’s metaphysics, founded on the supposition that two things, which are different, but have something in common, are the same. ”

“ Not, however, that all induction is causal; but where it is not, there is still less reason for making it a deduction from hypothesis. When from the fact that the many crows in our experience are black, we induce the probability that all crows whatever are black, the belief in the particulars is quite independent of this universal. How then can this universal be called, as Sigwart, for example, calls it, the ground from which these particulars follow? I do not believe that the crows I have seen are black because all crows are black, but vice versa. ”

“ Hence arose conceptual logic; according to which conception is a simple apprehension of an idea without belief in being or not being, e.g. the idea of man or of running; judgment is a combination of conceptions, adding being or not being, e.g. man is running or not running; and reasoning is a combination of judgments: conversely, there is a mental analysis of reasoning into judgments, and judgment into conceptions, beneath the linguistic analysis of rational discourse into propositions, and propositions into terms. ”

“ Logic arose, at least for the Western world, in the golden age of Greek speculation which culminated in Plato and Aristotle. There is an Indian logic, it is true, but its priority is more than disputable. In any case no influence upon Greek thought can be shown. The movement which ends in the logic of Aristotle is demonstrably self-contained. When we have shaken ourselves free of the prejudice that all stars are first seen in the East, Oriental attempts at analysis of the structure of thought may be treated as negligible. ”

“ Not only sense is a principle of difference. The ideas are many. The multiplicity in unity must be established within thought itself. Otherwise the objection stands: man is man and good is good, but to say that man is good is clearly to say the thing that is not. Plato replies with the doctrine of the interpenetration of ideas, obviously not of all with all, but of some with some, the formula of identity in difference within thought itself. ”

“ Kant’s limits that must needs be thought and yet cannot be thought must be thought away. An earnest attempt to satisfy this demand was made by Fichte whose single principle was the activity of the pure Ego, while his single method was the assertion of a truth revealed by reflection on the content of conscious experience, the characterization of this as a half truth and the supplementation of it by its other, and finally the harmonization of both. The pure ego is inferred from the fact that the non-ego is realized only in the act of the ego in positing it. ”

“ The Sophistes shows among other things that an identity-philosophy breaks down into a dualism of thought and expression, when it applies the predicate of unity to the real, just as the absolute pluralism on the other hand collapses into unity if it affirms or admits any form of relation whatsoever. Identity and difference are all-pervasive categories, and the speech-form and the corresponding thought-form involve both. For proposition and judgment involve subject and predicate and exhibit what a modern writer calls “identity of reference with diversity of characterization.” ”

“ But how little does the psychologist know about the association of ideas, compared with what the logician has discovered about the processes of inference! The fact is that our primary consciousness of all mental operations is hardly equal to our secondary consciousness of the processes of the one operation of inference from premises to conclusions permeating long trains and pervading whole sciences. This elaborate consciousness of inferential process is the justification of logic as a distinct science, and is the first step in its method. ”