CORRESPONDENCE 



To the Editor of Science Progress 

 "ELEMENTARY LOGIC" 



SIR, — In an interesting review of my Elementary Logic (in No. 35 of this Journal) 

 Mr. Shelton asks a question which I am glad to answer. He asks why I should 

 have written a textbook so nearly on the old lines. Three reasons appealed to 

 me : First, that in no other way would the book have had a chance of being used 

 at the present time ; secondly, that all through Part I. the reader is guarded 

 against taking the subject for more than it is worth ; and thirdly, that the contrast 

 between the old Logic and its successors is by this method made more visible. 



I do not quite agree with him that because the old Logic fails to accomplish its 

 purpose of being applied to actual reasoning it should be regarded as a strictly 

 formal science. In so far as it is kept strictly formal it seems to me to stop short 

 of being science — unless we mean by "science " something very unimportant. In 

 two ways chiefly it differs from science as now best conceived : (1) It is pervaded 

 by the notion that finally coercive proof is attainable ; and (2) it is essentially 

 something to be learnt, instead of being a subject in which original thought is 

 required. Since the chief actual work of science consists in correcting, little by 

 little, previously accepted scientific beliefs, these two qualities seem to me deeply 

 anti-scientific. And it differs from mathematics partly in the fact that the com- 

 plexities of the latter have a practical value, and partly that they have so little (if 

 any) misleading influence. 



Alfred Sidgwick. 



PARTY POLITICS AND SCIENTIFIC REPRESENTATION 



SIR,— Your leading article in the January number of Science Progress makes 

 an indictment of the evils of party politics, the force of which will generally be 

 admitted. Yet parties are a natural formation, almost a necessary formation, in a 

 popularly elected chamber endowed with legislative or executive powers ; for 

 "party," in the words of Edmund Burke, " is a body of men united for promoting 

 by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle in 

 which they are all agreed." In the accomplishment of any act which requires a 

 common effort individual members will be found ready to subordinate personal 

 preferences on questions not of primary importance for the sake of the general 

 purpose. Party oiganisation may, however, be carried to the stage when the 

 individual is denied the use of his own judgment, and is compelled upon pain of 

 exclusion to follow the party dictates into ways he strongly feels to be contrary to 

 the national good. Willing or unwilling, the partisan becomes the slave of the 

 party. The environment of present-day politics is hostile to men of broad views 



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