ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE. 611 



extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate 

 or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, be- 

 yond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not 

 sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, 

 illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the 

 social principle. 



To be logical men should not be selfish; and, in point of fact, they 

 are not so selfish as they are thought. The willful prosecution of 

 one's desires is a different thing from selfishness. The miser is not 

 selfish ; his money does him no good, and he cares for what shall be- 

 come of it after his death. We are constantly speaking of our pos- 

 sessions on the Pacific, and of our destiny as a republic, where no 

 personal interests are involved, in a way which shows that we have 

 wider ones. We discuss with anxiety the possible exhaustion of coal 

 in some hundreds of years, or the cooling-off of the sun in some 

 millions, and show in the most popular of all religious tenets that we 

 can conceive the possibility of a man's descending into hell for the 

 salvation of his fellows. 



Now, it is not necessary for logicality that a man should himself 

 be capable of the heroism of self-sacrifice. It is sufficient that he 

 should recognize the possibility of it, should perceive that only that 

 man's inferences who has it are really logical, and should consequent- 

 ly regard his own as being only so far valid as they would be accepted 

 by the hero. So far as he thus refers his inferences to that standard, 

 he becomes identified with such a mind. 



This makes logicality attainable enough. Sometimes we can per- 

 sonally attain to heroism. The soldier who runs to scale a wall 

 knows that he will probably be shot, but that is not all he cares for. 

 He also knows that if all the regiment, with whom in feeling he iden- 

 tifies himself, rush forward at once, the fort will be taken. In other 

 cases we can only imitate the virtue. The man whom we have sup- 

 posed as having to draw from the two packs, who if he is not a lo- 

 gician will draw from the red pack from mere habit, will see, if he is 

 logician enough, that he cannot be logical so long as he is concerned 

 only with his own fate, but that that man who should care equally for 

 what was to happen in all possible cases of the sort could act logi- 

 cally, and would draw from the pack with the most red cards, and 

 thus, though incapable himself of such sublimity, our logician would 

 imitate the effect of that man's courage in order to share his logicality. 



But all this requires a conceived identification of one's interests 

 with those of an unlimited community. Now, there exist no reasons, 

 and a later discussion will show that there can be no reasons, for 

 thinking that the human race, or any intellectual race, will exist for- 

 ever. On the other hand, there can be no reason against it ; * and, 



1 I do not here admit an absolutely unknowable. Evidence could show us what 

 would probably be the case after any given lapse of time ; and though a subsequent time 



