8 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



such suspicion too far, and it is very desirable, if possible, 

 actually to discover the exact nature of the error when 

 it exists. But there is no doubt that what we may call 

 the empirical outlook has become part of most educated 

 people's habit of mind ; and it is this, rather than any 

 definite argument, that has diminished the hold of the 

 classical tradition upon students of philosophy and the 

 instructed public generally. 



The function of logic in philosophy, as I shall try to 

 show at a later stage, is all-important ; but I do not 

 think its function is that which it has in the classical 

 tradition. In that tradition, logic becomes constructive y 

 through negation. Where a number of alternatives seem, 

 at first sight, to be equally possible, logic is made to 

 condemn all of them except one, and that one is then 

 pronounced to be realised in the actual world. Thus 

 the world is constructed by means of logic, with little 

 or no appeal to concrete experience. The true function 

 of logic is, in my opinion, exactly the opposite of this. 

 As applied to matters of experience, it is analytic rather 

 than constructive ; taken a priori^ it shows the possibility 

 of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the 

 impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie 

 possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what 

 the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the 

 world is. This change, which has been brought about 

 by an internal revolution in logic, has swept away the 

 ambitious constructions of traditional metaphysics, even 

 for those whose faith in logic is greatest ; while to the many 

 who regard logic as a chimera the paradoxical systems 

 to which it has given rise do not seem worthy even of 

 refutation. Thus on all sides these systems have ceased 

 to attract, and even the philosophical world tends more 

 and more to pass them by. 



