LOGIC: A REJOINDER TO MISS 



STEBBING 



Bv CHARLES MERCIER, M.D., F.R.C.P. 



Miss Stebbing's reply to my charges against logic does not 

 seem to me successful ; but as it does seem successful to some 

 people, a rejoinder may be permitted. She says, " It is a 

 commonplace amongst present-day logicians that the excessive 

 claims made on behalf of the syllogism by e.g. Whately, and no 

 less by J. S. Mill, must be rejected." I have given some logicians 

 the credit, not in the article in Science Progress, but in another 

 place, for expressing a half-hearted doubt whether, after all, 

 the syllogism is entitled to all the powers claimed for it ; but 

 I said, and it is true, that this half-hearted admission has no real 

 influence in leavening their doctrines. They have been com- 

 pelled, as Galileo was compelled, though by different methods, 

 to make the admission in words, but they have not altered their 

 teaching in the slightest. 



The logician is an elusive and eel-like person. When you 

 try to pin him down to some flagrant absurdity that is taught 

 in all the books, and ask him if it is consistent with common 

 sense and manifest fact, he puts you off airily with this evasion. 

 "That," he says, "is no longer taught. No logician would 

 teach that now." " But it is in all the books ? " At this he 

 smiles a superior, not to say a supercilious smile, and tells you 

 that you must not go by the books, and leads you to infer that 

 the true doctrine is to be heard in his class-room only. Now I 

 maintain that in order to discover the actual state of any science 

 at any time, what doctrines are accepted and prevail, the only 

 method is to take as a guide the text-books that are most widely 

 used by students in preparing for examination in that subject. 

 These books will make only a passing reference, or none at all, 

 to doctrines that are held so lightly and by so few that they 

 have not yet been incorporated into the accepted scheme of 

 doctrine, but they dare not exclude any doctrine, however novel, 



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