AND ON THE LOGIC OF RELATIONS. 



333 



admission would grow that if these same foregoers had worked themselves into the same 

 familiarity with relation in general which they obtained with what I call onymatic relations, 

 and still more if they had cultivated those yet wider fields which lie beyond, the common 

 language would have now possessed facilities on the want of which* he founds his assertion 

 of the sufficiency of the old logic. Though satisfied that the educated world is in advance 

 of the current system of logic, I feel equally sure that a more extensive system would work 

 a still greater progress. 



The investigation of the subject of relation has kept before my thoughts, and with a 

 de te fabula narratur of a most humiliating character, conclusions which instruction of 

 young minds during more than thirty years has forced upon me. A person accustomed 

 to teach mathematics from the earliest commencement to the highest theories, to pupils 

 wholly unformed in inference upon matter with which they are not familiar, has a perception 

 of the difficulties of the uneducated process of reasoning which few others can arrive at. 

 And that which he cannot help seeing in the efforts of an unformed mind, decided in cha- 

 racter and large in amount, he learns to detect in the more advanced student and in the 

 educated man. At the same time he finds the reason why the deficiency need not be 

 acknowledged, and may even be denied by any one who takes the proper ground. For it is 

 not a deficiency which strikingly manifests itself in habitual faults of commission : habitual 

 faults are only in habitual things. The evil is most patent when new and strange materials 

 are submitted to the mind ; and it bears fruit, though of course undetected by positive con- 

 sequences, in the many cases in which want of power is a prohibition. 



The uncultivated reason proceeds by a process almost | entirely material. Though the 

 necessary law of thought must determine the conclusion of the plough-boy as much as that of 

 Aristotle himself, the plough-boy's conclusion will only be tolerably sure when the matter of 

 it is such as comes within his usual cognizance. He knows that geese being all birds does 

 not make all birds geese, but mainly because there are ducks, chickens, partridges, &c. A 



• An existing instrument always appeals to the fact — in 

 justice I must say the established fact — that all which ever 

 was done resulted from the use of then existing instruments. 

 In our own day Brown Bess has asked the long range rifle 

 how many battles she won in the Peninsula : to which tlie 

 rifle has replied by asking Brown Bess how many battles she 

 won forty years before she was invented. 



f The syllogism is complex, and so is the act of walking : 

 but in both cases the mind produces the whole without a con- 

 sciousness of parts. Several persons have thought 1 was car- 

 rying things too far when, in my first paper, I said that a 

 person who calls oat John t enunciates two propositions, 

 " John is the person I want," and, " You are John." They 

 will probably think that the author cited by 'Roger Bacon 

 (Opus Tertium, p. 102) also went too far, in the following 

 passage. "Auctor Perspectivse ponit exemplum de puero 

 qui cum ei off'eruntur duo poma, quorum unum est pulchrius 

 altero, ipse eligit pulchrius, et non nisi quia judicat pulchrius 

 esse melius, et quod est melius est magis eligendum. Ergo 

 de necessitate puer arguit sic apud se : quod est pulchrius est 

 melius, et quod est melius est magis eligendum ; ergo pomum 



pulchrius est magis eligendum Unde licet laici non ha- 



beaiit vocabula logicas quibus clerici utuntur, tamen habeut 

 suos modos solvendi omne argumentum falsuni. Et ideo .voca- 

 bula sola logicorum deticiunt laicis, non ipsa scientia logic£E." 



It is very difficult to deny that both the premises and the 

 conclusion are truly parts of the boy's mental act of choice: 

 but quite impossible to admit that they are separate parts. 

 We must distinguish between the compound act of the un- 

 educated thinker, and the analysed compound of the logician ; 

 between the process guided by law, and the cognizance of the 

 law which guides. It is not true that the law by which 

 thought is governed must be part of the thought which is 

 governed : though some writers against logic have spoken as 

 if they would sanction the affirmative. And, similarly, some 

 writers against gravitation are hardly intelligible except when 

 taken as implying that Newton gave the particles of matter 

 some mysterious cognizance of 7n:r^. 



It is also clear that the opinion of Roger Bacon's time 

 tended to the conclusion that logic is a science of invented laws, 

 not an analysis of the actual laws of thinking ; the mistake is 

 not yet defunct. 



