SOME LOGICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES 223 



presumptions or the grounds of his beliefs. On the contrary, 

 the process is distasteful and repellent ; it is irksome, and even 

 painful ; it is never attempted except under the compulsion of 

 circumstances, and those who bring about these circumstances 

 and compel us to reconsider our presumptions are so abhorred 

 and detested that they are punished as severely as we have 

 power to punish them. This has been the fate of reformers in 

 all ages and in all countries, and we need not go beyond the 

 limits of Logic for an example. In the sixteenth century Peter 

 Ramus was formally tried for the offence of differing from 

 Aristotle ; he was deprived of his professorship, his books were 

 destroyed, he was threatened by command of the king with 

 corporal punishment if he did not cease his attacks upon the 

 Stagyrite, he was driven from his country, and at last, under 

 the pretence that it was for his Protestantism, he was murdered. 

 Yet the utmost departure that he had ventured to make from 

 the doctrine of Aristotle was the purely technical difference of 

 dividing the figures of the syllogism according to the place 

 of the middle term in the premisses instead of according to the 

 relation of the middle term to the major and minor terms, as 

 Aristotle taught. 



With this example before my eyes, it is with natural trepida- 

 tion that I have proposed a sweeping revolution in the doctrines 

 of Logic ; but on reflection I take heart. The only tribunal by 

 which I could be tried for my logical heresy is the Court of 

 King's Bench, and by this Court only if some indignant logician 

 were to sue me for libel. If such an action should be brought, 

 I should call upon the plaintiff to argue his case exclusively by 

 the syllogism. This he could not do, for a logician can no more 

 conduct an argument by syllogistic reasoning than a professor 

 of Latin can converse in the language he teaches. If he refused, 

 the jury would no doubt stop the case. If he accepted, he could 

 not keep his undertaking ; but if, by a miracle, he should over- 

 come this real logical impossibility, the jury would at first 

 laugh at him, and before the first month of his argument was 

 ended they would all be dead of acute boredom, and my 

 adversary would himself be on his trial for manslaughter. 



If an appeal were made to King George V. to deprive me of 



my professorship, I should rely with no less confidence on the 



justice of my cause and the good sense and clemency of His 



Majesty than on the fact that I hold no professorship, though 



