THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



NOVEMBER, 1877. 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE. 



By C. S. PEIECE, 



ASSISTANT, UNITED STATES COAST SURVEY. 



FIRST PAPER. THE FIXATION OF BELIEF. 



FEW persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives 

 himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. 

 But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocina- 

 tion, and does not extend to that of other men. 



We come to the full possession of our power of drawing infer- 

 ences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift 

 as a long and difficult art. The history of its practice would make a 

 grand subject for a book. The mediaeval schoolmen, following the 

 Romans, made logic the earliest of a boy's studies after grammar, as 

 being very easy. So it was, as they understood it. Its fundamental 

 principle, according to them, was, that all knowledge rests on either 

 authority or reason ; but that whatever is deduced by reason depends 

 ultimately on a premise derived from authority. Accordingly, as 

 soon as a boy was perfect in the syllogistic procedure, his intellectual 

 kit of tools was held to be complete. 



To Roger Bacon, that remarkable mind who in the middle of the 

 thirteenth century was almost a scientific man, the schoolmen's con- 

 ception of reasoning appeared only an obstacle to truth. He saw 

 that experience alone teaches anything a proposition which to us 

 seems easy to understand, because a distinct conception of experience 

 has been handed down to us from former generations ; which to him 

 also seemed perfectly clear, because its difficulties had not yet un- 

 folded themselves. Of all kinds of experience, the best, he thought, 

 was interior illumination, which teaches many things about Nature 



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