LECTURE II 



LOGIC AS THE ESSENCE OF 

 PHILOSOPHY 



The topics we discussed in our first lecture, and the 

 topics we shall discuss later, all reduce themselves, in 

 so far as they are genuinely philosophical, to problems 

 of logic. This is not due to any accident, but to the 

 fact that every philosophical problem, when it is subjected 

 to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either 

 to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the 

 sense in which we are using the word, logical. But as 

 the word "logic " is never used in the same sense by two 

 different philosophers, some explanation of what I mean 

 by the word is indispensable at the outset. 



Logic, in the Middle Ages, and down to the present 

 day in teaching, meant no more than a scholastic collection 

 of technical terms and rules of syllogistic inference. 

 Aristotle had spoken, and it was the part of humbler 

 men merely to repeat the lesson after him. The trivial 

 nonsense embodied in this tradition is still set in examina- 

 tions, and defended by eminent authorities as an excellent 

 " propaedeutic," i.e. a training in those habits of solemn 

 humbug which are so great a help in later life. But it is 

 not this that I mean to praise in saying that all philosophy 

 is logic. Ever since the beginning of the seventeenth 

 century, all vigorous minds that have concerned them- 

 selves with inference have abandoned the mediaeval 



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