210 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



If any one else should assert that a thing is impossible, the 

 doing of that thing before his eyes would at any rate raise 

 doubts in his mind whether it was really impossible ; but the 

 logician is unmoved. He wraps himself in his mackintosh of 

 logical doctrine, and the rain of facts pours off him like water 

 off a duck's back. Traditional Logic has many professors, but 

 few students. It has many professors because the bounty of 

 past ages, when Logic was the most important of the three 

 subjects that alone entered into a liberal education, has endowed 

 many professorial chairs of Logic. That it has few students is 

 due to the general appreciation of its uselessness ; but this 

 appreciation is vague, and is due, not to any analysis or 

 exposure of the futility of Logic, but to the cumulative effect of 

 many indications, more felt than explicitly acknowledged, 

 among them the following : 



Every one who has ever looked into a book of Logic says to 

 himself, This is all very well : these simple arguments are valid, 

 no doubt, but what piffle they are ! They will do very well for 

 the nursery, but when am I coming to the important methods 

 of reasoning? These are not the kinds of argument that men 

 use in real life : when am I coming to the methods men do use ? 

 But he never comes to them, or if he does find some of them in 

 the chapter on Induction, he finds them explained in a way 

 that thoroughly puzzles him, and does not convince him in the 

 least. Those who have learnt Logic, and especially those who 

 teach Logic, are not better reasoners, nor have they greater 

 mastery of clear statement, than others who know nothing of 

 Logic : on the contrary, taken as a whole, the arguments of 

 logicians are more wanting in cogency, and their statements 

 are more confused. So wanting are their arguments in cogency, 

 that much space in every book on Logic is occupied in exposing 

 the fallacies perpetrated in other books on Logic. So wanting 

 are their statements in clearness, that the two professors of 

 Logic who are most followed at the present time, and who are 

 credited with the greatest profundity of original thought, write 

 so abominably that they are always difficult to understand, and 

 sometimes completely unintelligible. The business of Parlia- 

 ment and of Courts of Law is carried on mainly by argument, 

 but no form of argument that is taught in Logic is ever used in 

 a Court of Law or in Parliament ; and if any one were to use 

 in any of these Courts a " logical " argument, he would be 



