332 



Mk DE morgan, on the syllogism, No. IV, 



they do their own literary ancestors less than justice with an assumption by which they take 

 advantage of their own wrong. Their predecessors worked the modern languages into 

 adequate vehicles of scientific thought. They greatly augmented what they found in the 

 Latin of the power of the Greek : and the vernacular idioms, partly by abstraction and 

 partly by imitation, acquired the increased power of the Latin. From the first growth of 

 experimental science down to our own day the logicians have not shewn themselves aware 

 of this: at least they have not known how to use it in efficient defence of 'the schoolman' 

 from the sneers of the physical writers. A person who approaches mediaeval psychology fresh 

 from a long course of thought on exact science, its language, its progress, and its impediments, 

 finds the claim of the scholastic writers presented to him in a strong light. He seeks the old 

 books to learn something about the ' trammels' — this is, I believe, the proper technical 

 word — ^in which they bound the human mind : for the human mind, he has been implicitly 

 instructed, is rapid and vigorous in abstract science, if only it take care to follow no leader. 

 But he finds that very much of his own lingual power of expressing abstract thought is 

 due to the action of these schoolmen upon his mother-tongue : he feels that he is at the 

 fountain-head of his own scientific idiom : he learns that those who raised the seed have been 

 ignorant enough to think lightly of those who dug and manured the ground ; and he 

 comes to know that language capable of science can only be the result of deep thought 

 upon the mind in relation to words, and words in relation to things. He then remembers 

 the sarcasm* of the spider, and finds it a true description of a needful process: the web first, 

 the fly afterwards. 



The logician appeals to common thought in proof of liis system being an exposition 

 of the necessary laws of thought. In one sense he is right : his system contains the 

 necessary laws of thought ; for the actual thought of the lowest type of mankind must 

 be the maximum of the necessary thought : so that, on the Ricardo theory, the logician 

 has created a great deal of rent. But, meaning by a necessary law of thought that mode 

 of action which must guide the thinker who comes up to the point at which the question 

 of law or no law can arise, I affirm that all the difference between Aristotle or Occam and 

 the lowest of the noble savages who ran wild in the woods is only part, and I believe a 

 very small part, of the development of human power. If the logician could leaven his own 

 mind with a full sense of what his foregoers did for thought and for language, a spontaneous 



♦ Logicus araneae potest comparari, 

 Quae subfiles didicit telas operari, 

 Quie suis visceribus volunt consummari, 

 Est pretium musca — si forte queat laqueari. 

 When Bacon adopted this sarcasm, he left out the fly, and 

 propounded the web as the end, not the means : and he has 

 been followed by some original writers who have likened the 

 schoolman to the spider, which spins all its own nourishment 

 from its own bowels. 



The web which caught the flies at last was a mathematical 

 web: and in time an imitation of the mathematical web was 

 applied to subjects over which the empire of pure calculation 

 did not extend. Neither the medieval logicians nor the fol- 

 lowers of Bacon ever constructed a physical science. Those 

 who delight to call themselves the followers of Bacon are in 



reality followers of Galileo and of Newton — of Galileo, the 

 predecessor of Bacon in his works, and of Newton, who cannot 

 be proved to have known that there was such a person as Bacon. 

 Again and again has it been asked what discovery has ever 

 been made by that method which Bacon recommended ? and 

 always without answer. And for this reason, that the mythical 

 Bacon cannot be supported by quotations from tlie Novum 

 Organum. It is full time that those who actually read the 

 great work — for such it really is — which is supposed to have 

 taught experimental philosophy her rudiments, should either 

 support the pretensions advanced in its favour, or aid in the 

 substitution of others of a more correct character. Provided 

 always that Bacon's own method — which is very easily pro- 

 pounded — be advanced in Bacon's own words. 



