William Minto

“ It was when observation of Nature and its laws became a paramount pursuit that the defects of Syllogistic Logic began to be felt. Errors against which this Logic offered no protection then called for a safeguard—especially the errors to which men are liable in the investigation of cause and effect. "Bring your thoughts into harmony one with another," was the demand of Aristotle's age. "Bring your thoughts into harmony with authority," was the demand of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Similarly, to deny that So-and-so is not in the Twenty-first Regiment, is to imply that he is in another regiment, that he is in the army in some regiment. To retort upon this inference: "He is not in the army at all," is a quibble: as much so as it would be to retort: "There is no such person in existence".
Now Logic does not take account of this implication, and nothing has contributed more to bring upon it the reproach of quibbling. In Logic, to deny a quality is simply to declare a repugnance between it and the subject; negation is mere sublation, taking away, and implies nothing more. ”

“ A general may inspirit his soldiers by a falsehood. A man may cajole a weapon out of his friend's hand when he sees him about to commit suicide. A father may deceive his son into taking medicine. Would you call these men unjust? By some such process of interrogation we are brought to the definition that a man is unjust who deceives his friends to their hurt.
Observe that in much of his dialectic the aim of Socrates was merely to bring out the meaning lying vague and latent, as it were, in the common mind. ”

“ Truth often lies hid in the centre of a maze, and logical rules only help the searcher onwards by giving him warning when he is on the wrong track and must try another. It is the searcher's own impulse that carries him forward: Logic does not so much beckon him on to the right path as beckon him back from the wrong. In laying down the conditions of correct interpretation, of valid argument, of trustworthy evidence, of satisfactory explanation, Logic shows the inquirer how to test and purge his conclusions, not how to reach them. ”

“ It were better, he cried in his impatience, to burn Aristotle and make a fresh start than to accept his conclusions without inquiry.
Experimental Science, the sole mistress of Speculative Science, has three great Prerogatives among other parts of Knowledge. First, she tests by experiment the noblest conclusions of all other sciences. Next, she discovers respecting the notions which other sciences deal with, magnificent truths to which these sciences can by no means attain. Her third dignity is that she by her own power and without respect to other sciences investigates the secret of Nature. ”

“ Theoretically we know the full meaning of a name when we know all the attributes that it connotes, and we are not justified in extending it except to objects that possess all the attributes. This is the logical ideal, but between the ought to be of Logic and the is of practical life, there is a vast difference. How seldom do we conceive words in their full meaning! ”

“ It is a common notion that we need Logic to protect us against the arts of the Sophist, the dishonest juggler with words and specious facts. But in truth the Inner Sophist, whose instruments are our own inborn propensities to error, is a much more dangerous enemy. For once that we are the victims of designing Sophists, we are nine times the victims of our own irrational impulses and prejudices. ”

“ To speak of Logic as a body of rules for the investigation of truth has misled people into supposing that Logic claims to be an art of Discovery, that it claims to lay down rules by simply observing which investigators may infallibly arrive at new truths. Now, this does not hold even of the Logic of Induction, still less of the older Logic, the precise relation of which to truth will become apparent as we proceed. It is only by keeping men from going astray and by disabusing them when they think they have reached their destination that Logic helps men on the road to truth. ”

“ The truth is that generally when we speak of plurality of causes, of alternative possibilities of causation, we are not thinking of the effect in its individual entirety, but only of some general or abstract aspect of it. When we say, e.g., that death may be produced by a great many different causes, poison, gunshot wounds, disease of this or that organ, we are thinking of death in the abstract, not of the particular case under consideration, which as an individual case, has characters so distinctive that only one combination of causes is possible. ”

“ Bacon neither invented nor practised it. It was perfected gradually in the practice of men of science. The birthplace of it as a conscious method was in the discussions of the Royal Society of London, as the birthplace of the Aristotelian Logic was in the discussions of the Athenian schools. Its first great triumph was Newton's law of Gravitation. If we are to name it after its first illustrious practitioner, we must call it the Newtonian method, not the Baconian. Newton really stands to the Scientific Method of Explanation as Aristotle stands to the Method of Dialectic and Deduction. ”

“ Wise maxims are interpreted by us hastily in accordance with our own narrow conceptions. All the vocables of a language may be more or less familiar to us, and yet we may not have learnt it as an instrument of thought. Outside the very limited range of names for what we see and use in the daily routine of life, food and clothes and the common occupations of men, words have little meaning for us, and are the vehicles merely of thin preconceptions and raw prejudices. ”

“ If we have seen but one man of a nation, we are apt to conclude that all his countrymen are like him; we cannot suspend our judgment till we have seen more. Confident belief, as Dr. Bain remarks, is the primitive attitude of the human mind: it is only by slow degrees that this is corrected by experience. The old adage, "Experience teaches fools," has a meaning of its own, but in one sense it is the reverse of the truth. The mark of a fool is that he is not taught by experience, and we are all more or less intractable pupils, till our energies begin to fail. ”

“ We might call the method the Newtonian method, for all four stages are marked in the prolonged process by which he made good his theory of Gravitation.
To give the name of Inductive Method simply to all the four stages of an orderly procedure from doubt to a sufficient explanation is to encourage a widespread misapprehension. There could be no greater error than to suppose that only the senses are used in scientific investigation. There is no error that men of science are so apt to resent in the mouths of the non-scientific. ”

“ Given perplexity as to the cause of any phenomenon, what is our natural first step? We may describe it as searching for a clue: we look carefully at the circumstances with a view to finding some means of assimilating what perplexes us to what is already within our knowledge. Our next step is to make a guess, or conjecture, or, in scientific language, a hypothesis. We exercise our Reason or Nous, or Imagination, or whatever we choose to call the faculty, and try to conceive some cause that strikes us as sufficient to account for the phenomenon. ”

“ Science has to exercise its ingenuity both in making hypotheses and in contriving occasions for testing them by observation. These contrived occasions are its artificial experiments, which have come to be called experiments simply by contrast with conclusive observations for which Nature herself furnishes the occasion. The observations of Science are not passive observations. The word experiment simply means trial, and every experiment, natural or artificial, is the trial of a hypothesis. In the language of Leonardo da Vinci, "Theory is the general, Experiments are the soldiers". ”

“ There is no method of observing uniformities except simply observing them. Nor indeed is there any "method" of inferring from them: we can only point out that in every particular inference from them we assume or postulate their continuance generally. As regards their observation, we may point out further that a special fallacy is incident to it, the fallacy of ignoring exceptions. If we are prepossessed or prejudiced in favour of a uniformity, we are apt to observe only the favourable instances, and to be blind to cases where the supposed invariable coincidence does not occur. ”

“ The Platonic doctrine, formulated by the Schoolmen as Universalia ante rem, has also a plain validity. Individuals come and go, but the type, the Universal, is more abiding. Men are born and die: man remains throughout. The snows of last year have vanished, but snow is still a reality to be faced. Wisdom does not perish with the wise men of any generation. In this plain sense, at least, it is true that Universals exist before Individuals, have a greater permanence, or, if we like to say so, a higher, as it is a more enduring, reality. ”

“ When the circumstances are simple and the effect follows at once, as when hot water scalds, or a blow with a stick breaks a pane of glass, there can be no doubt of the causal connexion so far, though plenty of room for further inquiry into the why. But the mere succession of phenomena may be obscure. We may introduce more than one agent without knowing it, and if some time elapses between the experimental interference and the appearance of the effect, other agents may come in without our knowledge. ”

“ The precise point of Hamilton's theory was that the logician does not concern himself with the question whether two concepts are or are not as a matter of fact found in the same subject, but only with the question whether they are of such a character that they may be found, or cannot be found, in the same subject. In so far as his theory is sound, it is an abstruse and technical way of saying that we may consider the consistency of propositions without considering whether or not they are true, and that consistency is the peculiar business of syllogistic logic. ”

“ To discuss, as is sometimes done, whether Fallacies lie within the proper sphere of Logic, is to obscure the [page 18] real connexion between Fallacies and Logic. It is the existence of Fallacies that calls Logic into existence; as a practical science Logic is needed as a protection against Fallacies. Such historically is its origin. We may, if we like, lay down an arbitrary rule that a treatise on Logic should be content to expound the correct forms of interpretation and reasoning and should not concern itself with the wrong. ”

“ What is a belief? One of the uses of Logic is to set us thinking about such simple terms. An exhaustive analysis and definition of belief is one of the most difficult of psychological problems. We cannot enter upon that: let us be content with a few simple characters of belief.
First, then, belief is a state of mind. Second, this state of mind is outward-pointing: it has a reference beyond itself, a reference to the order of things outside us. In believing, we hold that the world as it is, has been, or will be, corresponds to our conceptions of it. ”

“ Thus, while it is perfectly correct to say that every proposition expresses either truth or falsehood, or that the characteristic quality of a judgment is to be true or false, it is none the less correct to say that we may temporarily suspend consideration of truth or falsehood, and that this is done in what is commonly known as Formal Logic. ”

“ If the property inferred is known or presumed to be a concomitant of one or more of the points of resemblance, any argument from analogy is superfluous. This is, in effect, to say that we have no occasion to argue from general resemblance when we have [page 371] reason to believe that a property follows from something that an object is known to possess. If we knew that any one of the planets possessed all the conditions, positive and negative, of life, we should not require to reckon up all the respects in which it resembles the earth in order to create a presumption that it is inhabited. ”

“ Thus the fact that we cannot form a conceptual image composed solely of common attributes has been used to support the argument of Ultra-Nominalism, that the individuals classed under a common name have nothing in common but the name. What the word "dog" signifies, i.e., the "concept" of dog, is neither big nor little, neither black nor tan, neither here nor there, neither Newfoundland, nor Retriever, nor Terrier, nor Greyhound, nor Pug, nor Bulldog. The concept consists only of the attributes common to all dogs apart from any that are peculiar to any variety or any individual. ”